


Chemical Bonding

by Snickfic



Series: I Thought You'd Be Taller [5]
Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - College/University, Coming of Age, F/M, Female Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-22 16:17:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/915345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gen is the world's tiniest alpha chick, and she's crushing on the hottest, hugest omega dude to ever walk this earth - or at least the grounds of their college campus. But while getting him to go out with her is easy, building the kind of relationship she’s hoping for is more difficult, especially when one person is still struggling to find her place among alpha kind and the other is a little too used to people liking him solely for his come-fuck-me omega perfume.</p><p>
  <i>Note: Part of a series, but can be read as a standalone. My cheat sheet for SPN RPF characters is <a href="http://snickfic.livejournal.com/269542.html">here</a>.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for spn_j2_bigbang. Huge thanks to my wonderful artist scarletscarlet, who did all the art below. Be sure to [visit her masterpost](http://scarletscarlet.livejournal.com/136014.html) to see the full-scale versions and tell her how awesome she is! Thanks also to my betas ghostyouknow27 and gryfndor_godess.
> 
> This fic is part of a series, but can be read alone.

The line at the Grease is horrendously long, full of anxious freshmen and proud parents, and once Gen finally gets to the counter there’s a fraught moment when the kid behind it thinks they might be out of ice cream sandwiches. They are _not allowed_ to be out of ice cream sandwiches. He eventually scrounges up another box from the freezer, and disaster is averted. 

Gen takes her two sandwiches and makes her way up the stairs and out to the quad. She doesn’t have to push too hard to get through the crowd; the omegas part for her on the strength of scent alone, and the betas unconsciously follow suit. The other alphas she can step around easily enough.

Danneel, bless her heart, has snagged two of the coveted Adirondack chairs and is sitting in one with her ankles hooked over the other. They’re even under a maple tree, shaded from the late August sun. Gen slides into the unoccupied chair and hands Danneel her sandwich.

“So we’re here,” Danneel says. She has been since yesterday, actually. Gen’s parents dropped Gen and a semester’s worth of living off at the dorm this morning. This is the first chance she’s had since to just sit. 

“Starting the year off right,” she says, brandishing her sandwich. Vanilla ice cream trickles down her thumb. “You have your books?”

“The last Amazon box came right before I left,” Danneel says. “All I have left is that packet of articles for McCorsky’s class. I’ve been working up the courage to brave the bookstore.”

“I’ll go with you,” Gen says. “Big strong alpha will keep you from getting stepped on.” 

“I’m three inches taller than you.”

“That’s because you’re stupidly tall for an omega,” Gen grumbles. Danneel neither calls her on the untruth nor makes the obvious retort about _Gen’s_ height, which is one more reason that somehow she is Gen’s best friend, omega or no.

Danneel watches the ongoing mill of students across the quad with unusually keen interest. Gen doesn’t see anything especially worth looking it. Well, a guy in a sarong, but that’s only moderately noteworthy. Danneel’s eyes don’t seem to be landing anywhere, though, which gives Gen an idea. 

“So,” she says carelessly. “You seen Jensen yet?”

“Not yet,” says Danneel, casual as anything. The casualness is totally ruined by the blood flushing her cheeks. 

“But you’ve been emailing.” Danneel let this slip during a phone conversation a month ago. Gen has tried not to make her _too_ sorry about that slip, but goddamn, it’s hard; Danneel embarrasses so easily. It’s ridiculous and adorable. “Is he even on campus? I mean, living in town, it’s not like he has to show up until Sunday night.”

“No, he’s here,” Danneel says. “He’s showing a friend around. Jared. He was up at the U last year? And he's transferring.”

“And is Jared hot?”

“Well, I haven’t seen him yet, either, so how would I know?”

“Don’t you sass me,” Gen says. “You think I took a frightened little chicklet under my wing last year so she could sass _me_?”

“Whatever. You know you only gave me the time of day because I smell of _awesome_.”

Gen sticks out her tongue because she can. Now she can tease Danneel mercilessly, and Danneel doesn’t just tuck her head in and wait for the blows to come, the way she did this time last year. Some days Gen’s so proud of Danneel she could bust.

It’s possible she’d have said something to this effect, something ridiculous and sappy that’d spoil the moment, except right then in the crowd she spots a figure that is very interesting indeed. He’s well over six foot, shaggy-headed, skinny but starting to fill out. “ _He’s_ a gorgeous one.”

Danneel follows her line of sight. “He’s kind of stringy.”

Gen can’t pull her stare away. “Are you stupid? He has _dimples_.” She could set her heartbeat in time to his easy lope across the grass.

“That tall, he has to be an alpha,” Danneel says. 

“You _are_ stupid,” Gen says, sparing Danneel a glance. “He smells like a freaking siren call.” He’s omega. Even across twenty feet of crowd and fresh-mown grass, the sweet-sour perfume is unmistakable. 

“Is he frosh, do you think?” Danneel asks. 

“I don’t care what the hell year he is, as long as he’s enrolled.”

“Huh.”

There’s something in Danneel’s tone that finally gets Gen to turn around. “What?”

Danneel shrugs, the picture of innocence. “I’ve never actually _seen_ this obsession of yours. It’s cute.”

Gen sticks out her tongue again.

\---

Gen only knew Danneel a couple of months before certain key facts came out. Danneel was at her desk; Gen was sprawled out on Danneel’s bed. They were supposed to be studying. “So, do you have a knot?” Danneel asked.

The question always came, sooner or later. Gen held in a sigh. “Why don’t you ask that Aunt Regina you have?”

“Because she’s not my best friend. Also, awkward.” Danneel grimaced. “So. Knot.”

“Didn’t you take sex ed?”

“Sure,” Danneel said. “Alpha females got, like, a paragraph, which basically said it depends.”

“Right.” Gen blew her cheeks out. “Yes, okay? Yes, I have a peen with a knot that does exactly what knots do. Which is why I’m stuck wearing skirts and corduroys, because I need a little dick room, and none of the women’s jeans are designed for me. Freaking omegas with their freakish total lack of crotch.”

“Oh,” Danneel said, looking faintly embarrassed. “I thought you were just super into skirts. You always look really cute in them.”

“Yeah, well. Thanks.” Gen scowled. “And another thing. You know how they say some things are proportional?” 

“I didn’t think that was actually true.”

“Well, it is for me.”

“Um.” Danneel looked carefully at Gen and ventured, “That sucks?”

“Damn right it sucks. All you omegas are such freaking size queens. Even if I ever find my dreamboat omega and win him away from all the big alpha males, we’ll knot _once_ and I’ll never see him again.” She flopped facedown into Danneel was pillow and groaned.

“An omega guy?” Danneel said, and Gen looked up. “Is that what you’re looking for?”

It was a weird moment. She’d almost forgotten that there was anyone in the world who didn’t know. “Um, yeah.”

Danneel raised an eyebrow.

Gen cleared her throat. “I might have a fetish. A little one.” She pinched the air to demonstrate how little.

“Oh?”

So Gen explained about Gabe Tigerman, the omega who’d moved to town Gen’s sophomore year and turned her universe over. “It wasn’t like he was hot,” she said. “He was kind of short and scrawny, even for high school. And awkward. I mean, sweet and maybe a little bit cute, but whoa awkward.”

“So...”

“So he smelled...” Gen rolled over on her back and stared at the underside of the top bunk. “He transferred in mid-year, just coming off his heat. Took a week off to get it out of the way, I guess. So he walks into first period, and he’s all rich and gooey and that kind of sour that just slams you in the chest, you know?”

“Sure,” Danneel said, dryly.

“Fine, so maybe it smells different to you guys. Anyway, he’s all that, and then he’s... _guy_ , you know? Gym socks and shaving cream.”

“Yummy,” Danneel said, and she was definitely teasing now.

“And all together, it just... God, Danneel. Some things our crippled language just can’t express.”

Danneel was amused, skeptical, humoring. “Okay, so what happened?”

“So I followed him around for a month with my tongue hanging out.”

“And...?”

“And then, uh, I managed to say hello.” Gen was not going to notice Danneel’s huffed laughter. Nope. “It turned out he was dating this loser alpha in another state. Who he met on the Internet.” Gen rolled her eyes. “Anyway, we ended up hanging out a lot, the last year or so. He didn’t have friends, really. People at school were weird around him sometimes.”

“And you weren’t, except for the stalking.”

“Exactly.” Gen ignored the sarcasm. “So he’s how I figured it out. Me plus omega boy equals forever. Beta boy’ll do in a pinch, to let steam off with.” _No_ alphas, because that was just a bad idea all around. 

“Because he’ll smell like gym socks,” Danneel said. 

“Hey, I’d like him to be hot, too. It’s just not a must-have.”

“Your nose is weird.” 

Gen shrugs. Her nose requires no justification. 

“So... there are o-boys on campus. Why aren’t you following one of them around?”

“It’s not like there’s _lots_ ,” Gen muttered. “And I’m not going to go hitting on people in the cafeteria. I’d want to be in a class with them or something. And they’d have to be unattached, which...”

“Which what?”

“Which none of them have been that I’ve met. So.” She rolls her shoulders. “So Genevieve Cortese remains an unencumbered, free-roaming alpha. It’s a pretty good gig.” She leers meaningfully, and Danneel shakes her head.

\--

That was last year. Not much about Gen has changed, though, as far as she’s concerned: she still fucks omega girls when they want her to and beta boys when she can get them, and she still pines after her omega dream boy who’ll smell like all the best things at once. 

Until then, she’ll take what she can get. Maybe tonight she’ll see that guy she spotted on the quad. Even if she’s not planning to hit on him over dinner, it’s not a bad start to the year, finding a new someone to drool over from afar. She’s still thinking these pleasant thoughts when she takes her loaded tray into the cafeteria proper and gets caught by Rachel Miner. “Cortese,” Miner drawls.

Gen clutches her tray a little tighter. “Hey,” she says, neutral. Miner’s fine, as alpha girls go. When Gen had that really spectacular knock-down drag-out fight with her roommate last winter, she ended up living with Miner the rest of the year, and they did okay.

“How’d the summer treat you?” Miner asks.

Gen shrugs. “Fine.” She had the job from hell; she missed Danneel; she got _bored_. It’s not much to tell.

“So you got that rooming thing figured out with your friend? You’re living in O-Town these days?”

Gen rolls her eyes, although she supposes she might as well get used to this. Miner’s hardly going to be the last person who asks. “Holmen’s mixed – betas and omegas.” All girls. If Gen had been a _male_ alpha, even the force of her and Danneel's combined plea could never have brought this unorthodox rooming situation about.

“And one alpha.”

“And one alpha,” Gen agrees.

“Pretty sweet deal,” Miner muses, watching Gen closely. Gen shrugs again. “But you’re still joining the ladykillers on midnight raids, yes?” Miner’s eyes light with mischief – some of it probably at least marginally legal.

“I’m pretty busy,” Gen hedges. “Chem major, you know.”

“Hey, pre-med here, with a concentration in statistics and another one in CS. We are unimpressed by your lame-ass excuses.” Miner grins as she says it, but it doesn’t keep Gen from bristling a little. “You should come out with us.”

“I’m not really into that stuff,” Gen says, even though it’s anybody’s guess what ‘that stuff’ might mean this time. The ladykillers never try the same thing twice.

Miner scoffs. “What, are you all tamed now? They put you on good behavior when they let you go live with the omegas? Damn, Cortese.” 

“I’m busy,” Gen repeats, more heatedly than she’d like.

“You should come hang out. It’s gotta get lonely over there, nobody to play rough with.”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” Gen rolls her eyes and tries to look apathetic. Judging by Miner’s farewell smirk, it came across as agreement. Damn it.

Grumpy now, Gen goes to find Danneel at their usual table in the corner. Once upon a time Danneel claimed this table so she could keep an eye on the alpha tables, for her own peace of mind; now it’s habit. The location _is_ great for scoping people out, though, and as of this afternoon Gen and Danneel both have a vested interest in scoping, not to mention waving at friends not seen since May.

Lauren Cohan, for instance, with her parents and, lookee here, identical twin o-boys. Gen nudges Danneel. “Lauren’s mythical brothers.”

Danneel gets a good look and says, “They’re not just young, Gen, they’re _illegal_.”

“Now you’re just being obnoxious.”

Adrianne stops by for a hello and a hug from Danneel. They ask her to stay; _later_ , she promises. Right now Aldis’s folks are here, dropping him off, and she’s eating with them.

“Uh huh,” Gen says. Adrianne turns pink and takes her leave. She’s been with Aldis for almost a year; Gen’d have thought the sheen between them would wear off by now. Apparently not. 

“Oh,” Danneel breathes, looking over Gen’s shoulder. It’s a soft sound, not unhappy. Gen turns. _Oh_.

Jensen’s headed in their direction, dinner tray in hand and downwind of the open window, which is how Gen didn’t smell him coming. She can see how a person might find Jensen appealing: he’s definitely easy on the eyes, all freckled and sweet-faced. The face is a lie, though; his blood is one part plasma, two parts snark. Gen likes that about him. “Hey,” Jensen says to Danneel, his tone carefully nonchalant and his eyes alight. 

Not that Gen’s concerned just now with Danneel’s perpetually pending romance, because looming just behind Jensen and smiling pleasantly over his shoulder is Tall, Dimply and Gorgeous himself. “So this is Jared,” Jensen says. “He’s back to grace our little hometown school with his presence.”

“Shut up,” Jared says without heat.

“Jared, this is Gen, and this is Danneel.” 

At first Jared’s eyes slide right over Gen and on to Danneel. “Hey,” Jared says, with a little wave that Gen would be damn jealous of if Danneel weren’t already so thoroughly taken. Then he turns back around to Gen. He takes a sniff, for manners, and she does the same, like the smell of him isn’t already settling hot and low in her belly. There’s nothing in his face that suggests the _Oh my god you’re **alpha**_ reaction she’s frequently blessed with, which means Jensen mentioned her. Jensen _mentioned her_.

Down, girl. “Hi,” Gen says, totally casual.

“Hi,” Jared says. The dimples come out, and Gen is lost. 

“You mind if we join you?” Jensen asks Danneel. 

“Uh, sure. Sure.”

There’s some awkwardness as the guys get settled, a moment of uncertainty as to whether Gen should come around to share Danneel’s side of the booth, but eventually there’s a Jared sitting close enough to Gen that she may or may not be feeling the heat of his skin. Possibly that part’s her imagination. He seems entirely oblivious to the heady hormonal aroma. Gen supposes this is the less embarrassing possibility, but it’s also the much more frustrating one. Gen takes a deep breath and thinks about cold things.

Jensen startles her out of her concentration. “So how are you, Gen?”

Gen tries to collect herself a little. “Good,” she says. _Good_. She wants to smack herself. 

“So Jared,” Danneel says, because Danneel is still capable of behaving like an ordinary human being, “You were at the U?”

“Yeah,” Jared says. “I was going to be an engineer, but, uh, it turns out I really don’t like big schools. Or engineering.”

“You’re far away from both those things here,” Gen assures him.

“So Jensen tells me,” Jared says, grinning at her. He has to stop _doing_ that; Gen will never be able to talk to him if he keeps on that way. “What are you majoring in?”

This, thank God, moves the conversation into comfortable, well-traveled waters. Jared is maybe going to be a teacher, he thinks. History or English. Gen breathes shallowly and watches Jared out of the corner of her eye. He catches her at it and blushes, but then she catches him doing the same. 

Eventually it comes out that Danneel has already acquired a copy of the textbook that Jensen still has on order, and it would be awfully helpful if Jensen could copy the first chapter so he can read it before class starts in two days. How convenient if Jensen followed Danneel back to the dorm to borrow it from her. “But I can’t ditch you, man,” Jensen tells Jared. 

Jared rolls his eyes. “Dude, it’s not like I haven’t been on this campus dozens of times. I bet I can find Lindley Hall by all by myself.”

“Or I could show you,” Gen says, feeling completely transparent. 

“Sure,” Jared says, and the dimples come out again.

Gen might not survive the trip.

Outside the cafeteria, Jensen and Danneel break off to go back to Holmen, and Gen leads Jared out to the quad. “I assume you’ve heard a lot about Danneel?” she asks. “Because let me tell you, I know _all about_ Jensen.”

Jared shrugs, a smirk glinting in his eye. It’s a good look, that glint. It shows off his pretty, pretty eyeballs. “I might have heard her name a time or two thousand.”

“I haven’t really heard about you, though.”

Jared snorts. “Jensen didn’t mention I was omega, did he.”

Gen isn’t sure what the right response is here. “To be honest, I only know you exist because Danneel mentioned you were coming. Jensen might have said something to her, though.”

Jared shakes his head and pushes out the door onto the community patio. “He thinks he’s striking a blow for equality or something, not telling people about me in advance. Like all their preconceptions will somehow disappear in a puff of smoke if they see me before they smell me.”

“Ah,” Gen says, cautiously. She points him down the appropriate sidewalk, even though she doubts it’s necessary; one of the things she learned about Jared this evening is that he’s lived in this town most of his life. There’s a good chance he knows parts of this campus better than she does. “And how does that work out for you?”

He snorts. “About the same.”

“Which is what?”

He shoots her a sidelong glance. “The omegas still look at me a little weird, and the alphas still hit on me.”

“Oh,” Gen says. It’s not a particularly casual sound, try as she might.

Jared frowns. “What?”

Gen fixes her eyes firmly ahead on the sidewalk winding through the towering old maples. “I was totally going to hit on you, once I worked up the courage.”

“You were?”

She dares a glance at Jared. He looks surprised. “Hey!” she says, maybe a little offended. “I’m alpha, too, you know.”

“I noticed.”

Gen stops right there on the path and peers up into his eyes. He seems to be having trouble meeting hers. She ventures, “I could hit on you now, if you’d like.”

Jared looks up, all shyness and banked heat. “Okay.”

Okay. _Okay_. 

This cannot be Gen’s life. This doesn’t _happen_ in Gen’s life. “So, Jared,” she says. “I’d really like to take you out for ice cream. Or screw you. Whichever.”

Jared’s startled snort of laughter is fairly gratifying. It’s less gratifying when he starts choking and Gen has to start wondering whether she should pound him on the back. Eventually he recovers enough to say, “Seriously? That’s how you hit on people?”

Gen shrugs. “I’m not very good at subtle. And, you know, I figure I’m being honest.”

“That was very, very honest,” he agrees.

“So, does one of those sound appealing?” Gen asks, trying to keep the hope out of her voice. She shouldn’t be hopeful. Jared’s got to be at least half joking. “I mean, if you’re lactose intolerant or something, it doesn’t have to be ice cream. There's a bakery in town that does a lot of vegan stuff—”

“Ice cream would be awesome.” 

“Really?” Gen doesn’t squeak. Absolutely not.

“But I have this meeting I have to go to now. Um, I don’t really know what my schedule next week will be like. I’ll call you?”

“That sounds great,” Gen agrees. Totally casual.

\--

Gen tells Danneel that she’s taking Jared for ice cream. About thirty times, actually, she tells Danneel. Danneel smiles and shakes her head.

She tries to caution Gen. “Don’t get too invested, you know? You don’t know him yet.”

“Well, no. That’s what the ice cream is for.”

\--

Gen goes to meet Jared at his and Jensen’s room in Petersen Hall, the ten-story mixed beta/omega boys’ dorm. She peeks her head inside their open door. It’s full of Jensen’s casual geek chic clutter, which she recognizes from a visit or two to his room last year, and unfamiliar movie posters and sports pennants, which she assumes much be Jared’s. Jensen looks up from his sprawl on the lower bunk and gives her a heads-up hello. She replies in kind.

“Okay,” Jared says, bustling to the door. “I’m ready.”

“Be good, children,” Jensen says.

“Yeah, right.” Jared laughs and tosses Jensen the bird over his shoulder.

The elevator is stuffy and close, drenched with the odors of hundreds of students. In times like these, Gen envies betas’ weak noses a little. Even Jared doesn’t smell all that great right now. His scent lurches out from among all those others like a swamp monster rising from the mud. 

Outside, the evening sun casts their shadows long and thin in front of them. Gen asks Jared how Landingham is treating him so far, and he shrugs and smiles – not the full show-stopper with the dimples, but a quieter one with a twinkle in his eye – and tells her it’s good. “I guess I’m a hometown boy,” he confesses. “Not like the U is all that far away, but it was so big. I just felt like one more gumball in the gumball machine, waiting to get spit out at the end of four years.”

Gen nods, although it sounds a little bit wonderful, having that many people to get lost in. “There’s such a thing as too much community, you know.” He clearly doesn’t believe her. “I think Danneel feels the same way you do. She comes from a small town, too, you know? Landingham was kinda almost too big for her at first.”

Jared shoots her an amused glance. “From what Jensen says, it sounds like she’s settled in fine now.”

“Hey, that’s no small thanks to me,” Gen says. Jared laughs.

They cross the quad, and Gen finds herself walking just a little straighter, because to one side is a mixed cluster of students reading bits of a play aloud, out on the lawn betas are playing frisbee, and next to _her_ is the hottest guy on the quad, by a mile. An alpha looks up from his book and watches enviously as they pass him by. She knows it’s envy, because if they swapped places, she’d be green with it.

She and Jared reach the bottom of the hill and step off campus into the street. Gen sneaks a glance at Jared, and he catches her at it. There’s a flash of a grin, there and gone as soon as she can register it, and then Jared sticks his tongue out at her. She slaps his shoulder.

After a fifteen minute walk in late-August heat, the ice cream shop is blessedly cool, and it smells of sugar. Gen and Jared take their time choosing their flavors, and then they take their cones outside and settle on a bench with their backs to the shop’s brick wall. Around mouthfuls of ice cream, they talk.

“I swear I will never take a waitressing job again. Oh my God. I mean, I liked the work okay, but the betas, Jared. The _betas_.”

Jared looks at her over his cone – one scoop fudge ripple, one salted caramel. His eyebrows rise politely. He clearly isn’t getting the picture.

“They all think _I’m_ beta.” Gen takes a vicious lick of her pistachio.

“Oh?” Jared says, still polite.

She swallows and tells him, “Your imagination is failing you. All these farty old guys, pawing at me and calling me ‘sweetie.’ I came damn close to stabbing a knife through someone’s heart at least once a week.” Jared looks like he’s trying to hide a smile. Gen scowls and looks away, because otherwise the force of that smile will tease all the ire right out of her. “You saying you’ve never had some jerkass mistake you for a beta?”

Jared snorts. “Oh, no, I have.” That sounds like it has a story behind it. Gen waits. Jared clears his throat. “I, uh, I passed for beta for a few years. In school. Before I primed.”

“On purpose?”

Jared grips his cone in both huge hands. “Kind of. Yeah.”

Gen isn’t sure what to do with that. “So you liked it? Being beta?” 

“Yeah.”

Gen tries to imagine. It’s not like just any beta on the street knows what she is; unless she’s wearing something pretty snug in the crotch, there’s no obvious tell. On the other hand, the thought of trying to help that misapprehension along feels wrong, somehow. It chafes, like boots a size too large.

Finally, she asks, “So what about now?”

“What?”

“I mean, how do you feel about being beta now?” It occurs to her after she says it that this might be a really awkward question.

Jared shrugs. “Alphas are hot. Heat doesn’t always suck.” He smirks, and then something in her expression – which was not _particularly_ lech, she’d swear to it – turns him bright red. He clears his throat. “And it’s not like betas look at me and think _omega_ , seeing as I’m bizarrely huge for one.”

He doesn’t look bothered by this fact, exactly, but he doesn’t look unbothered, either. It’s difficult to tell. “I like that in a guy,” Gen tells him. Jared lifts an eyebrow. “I mean, all the guys are bigger than me. I might as well get off on it, right?”

Jared eyes her sharply, but from there the conversation veers away from the topic of people getting off, to Gen’s disappointment.

They walk back towards school and stop awhile on the footbridge over the river, playing Pooh sticks with twigs they scrounge from the bank. Without Gen even noticing, they get deep enough into each other spaces that suddenly they're rubbing shoulders and knocking elbows as they toss their competitors into the placid current. 

A breeze picks up off the river, the sun dips behind Landingham Hill – the town’s one and only significant rise in elevation - and Gen and Jared wander home. She knocks knuckles with him a couple of times, watching him out of the corner of her eye, and finally she slides her hand over his huge one. He bites back a smile, and Gen’s chest glows all rosy-warm. 

She walks him to the door of his dorm and stands there a moment shifting her weight from foot to foot, unsure whether to bid him a cheery wave goodbye or lean up and hope. Jared solves it for her; he ducks his head and steals a feather-light kiss, just a brush against her lips, a single whiff of him blown up her nose. When he pulls back, he’s bright red, and a hitch in his chest suggests his whiff of her did not leave him unaffected. “Until next time?” he asks.

“Okay,” she breathes.

\--

Unfortunately, school does not stop for burgeoning romance. Woe is Gen. Her week is crammed with shiny new homework and the introductory meetings of a dozen different student orgs. The most she and Jared can manage is a picnic: two caf trays and a blanket on the quad lawn. They mostly talk about homework, and there’s no kissing, and as soon as Jared’s last chicken finger is eaten he has to go meet someone for a group project thing.

A few times Jared and Jensen join Gen and Danneel’s crew in the cafeteria. Twice Gen manages to end up next to Jared. This is both good and bad, since it means she spends the whole meal alternating between taking little sharp breaths through her nose and then mentally talking her dick back down. It’s a test of willpower. Or something.

But it means she gets to talk to him, too. He has a seemingly unending stash of cheesy puns and a bright sudden laugh like a joyous thunderclap. Sometimes he and Jensen get drawn into talking anime – it’s usually Adrianne’s fault, her and her film studies elective – and he gets more and more animated until even Jensen, usually so very laid back, comes alive. The volume rises as they argue the fine points of some show that sounds like soap opera on crack.

Jared talks with his entire body. His eyes light and his face passes through an expression every second or so, it feels like, but even if he wore a mask she could tell his every feeling just by his shoulders, much less by his flailing arms and long-fingered hands, ever mobile. 

His tongue is never still, even when he’s listening instead of talking. It’s very distracting.

Gen told Danneel the truth: when she envisioned her dream guy, it was always more smells than sights. Gen is definitely a girl who thinks with her nose. And Jared smells of everything that is delicious, oh yes, but he also takes up a lot of space and has slanty cat-like brows, which aren't things it ever occurred to Gen to want.

She wants now, though. It’s a little disconcerting. She’s not quite sure what to do about it.

And sometimes a few beats after Gen rises to go, Jared will get up, too, and pull her chair back for her. Which is, well, damn weird. But sweet, she supposes.

At the end of the second week, Gen and Jared manage a just-them caf date. They take one of the tables for two up on the balcony, which his legs barely fit under – she keeps running into his knees. He tells her about high school track and big-school dorm life, about rooming his first semester at the U with Doerflinger, an old friend of doubtful socialization and hygiene. She tells him more about the ladykillers than she really means to, because he keeps asking questions.

“But they’re girls,” Jared keeps saying. “How does that work?”

Finally, she says, “You’re omega and a boy. How do _you_ work?” Jared blinks at her, apparently at a loss for words. “They’re just alphas,” she tells him. “They do alpha things.”

Jared wrinkles his nose and looks geared up to ask what things those might be, exactly, and Gen hurriedly changes the subject. 

\--

As if summoned, Miner drops by the dorm room that night. “Knock knock,” she says at the open door. 

Gen looks up from her reading corner of blankets wedged in the join between wall and mattress and bed frame. “Hey.” 

“So this is your place,” Miner says. She has stopped at the threshold, as alphas are supposed to in this dorm. Except for Gen. The rules are a little confused when it comes to Gen. Miner gives the room a quick eye roll, walls and floor and ceiling. “Gotta love all that headspace.” There’s plenty of it – Holmen’s top floor is famously spacious. It compensates somewhat for the wasps that tend to get in. 

“Yeah.” Gen pushes up on her elbows. “What’s up?”

Miner shrugs. “Me and Canning, we’re climbing the signal oak next week. Figured you might want in.”

“Just you guys?” Canning is not Gen’s favorite – there’s an itchy idea at the back of her mind that this is because Canning is too much like Gen – but they generally manage civility or what passes for it among alphas. There aren’t any of the alpha girls she really minds, though, at least individually. It’s as a group that things start feeling weird. 

“If we make it a party, it’ll get crashed. This year, I’m saving my hand slaps from the admin for something big. Anyway.” Miner rolls her shoulders. “Thursday night. You there?” Gen hesitates, and Miner crosses her arms. “You are not seriously skipping out on climbing the signal oak. Every ladykiller worth her dick climbs the signal oak.”

“Fine,” Gen mutters, because there’s nothing else to be said to that.

“Wear black,” Miner says, and then she’s gone.

Crap.

\--

Gen holds in her plans for joint vandalism for almost a week. She meets with Danneel and Jensen and Jared for meals, or sometimes Adrianne and Aldis, and she does her homework - hybridized orbitals are completely mysterious - and she doesn’t say anything.

It’s not like there’s much to say. She’s going to continue a venerable she-alpha tradition, that’s all.

Wednesday night, she breaks down and fesses up to Danneel.

“So you... don’t want to,” Danneel ventures.

“I don’t not want to,” Gen hedges.

“Are you scared of heights?”

Gen rolls her eyes. “No.” That’d make her feel less silly, honestly. Even alphas can be scared of heights.

“So...” Danneel waits, clearly waiting for Gen to fill in the gaps, but Gen has no filler. 

“Never mind. I don’t know. You can’t tell anyone.”

Danneel makes a face. “Obviously.”

\--

Thursday afternoon, high on pre-shenanigan jitters, Gen catches Jared outside the library. He’s wearing his backpack and carrying books in his hands, and probably he’s going off to read them and meditate or whatever it is humanities people do with their literature. The afternoon sun seems to light his brown hair from within. Something in Gen lights up, too. 

“Come watch a movie with me?” she says, a little breathless. He blinks at her, and she adds, “It’s for German. Aldis pirated me a copy.”

Jared blinks again. “My German pretty much begins and ends with _gesundheit_.”

“Aldis promised me subtitles.” Gen smiles hopefully up at him. She hadn’t planned anything like this, but now that it’s occurred to her, it will clearly improve her day immeasurably. “I have microwave popcorn.”

A grin creeps out from the behind the doubt. “Yeah, okay.”

She leads him in the general direction of her dorm. Somewhere near the halfway point, their fingers catch and don’t let go. When Gen turns down the sidewalk towards Holmen, though, Jared pulls to a stop. “You live here?”

“Yes?”

“With the omegas and betas?”

“I live with Danneel. I thought you knew?”

His eyebrows draw together. A V forms between them. It’s adorable. “I mean, yeah, I guess I didn’t put it together. You live _with_ Danneel?”

Gen rolls her eyes. “Yeah, and it was freaking hard, too, getting housing to see it our way. But I hate Frakes and I hate—” Well, she doesn’t _hate_ the ladykillers. Obviously. “—I just don’t get along with them that well. The other alpha girls. And Danneel’s my best friend.” She sounds defensive, she realizes, and she hates that, too. “Look, if you don’t want to watch the movie...”

“No, no,” he rushes to assure her. “Sorry. I was just confused.”

Gen shrugs. It doesn’t really do anything for the tightness in her shoulders. “Yeah, it’s okay. It confuses a lot of people.”

She takes him up the sidewalk and inside, and down the hall to stairs. No elevators. “I mean, if there were elevators,” Gen explains, “what kind of character-building exercise would it be to move into your top-floor room every fall?”

“Not much of one?”

“Exactly.” Gen and Danneel’s door is covered with pipe cleaners bent into butterfly wings, and the sign with their name has fuzzy pipe cleaner caterpillars stuck to it. “Our RA has a thing about insects,” Gen explains. “Adrianne’s sign has praying mantises.”

“Cool.”

Once the door’s open, Jared just stands in the doorway and gawks up at the ceiling. Which is, Gen will admit, damn awesome. “It helps make up for the lack of elevators,” she explains.

“I could never, ever hit my head in here,” Jared says, awe-struck.

“Well, maybe if you stood on Danneel’s bunk.”

“Maybe,” he agrees.

“There are girls in a triple down the hall that’ve stacked all three of their beds together.”

“Wow.”

But Gen did not bring Jared here to admire the architecture. “Movie?” she asks hopefully.

“Sure,” Jared says, still staring upward.

He follows her down to the kitchen, and while the popcorn bag turns in the microwave, he tells her about his poetry class. His second week into his first year of non-engineering, he has settled pretty comfortably that he’s into literature. He confesses this a little sheepishly. “It sounds so dweeby, right? Like, all the guys from high school would laugh at me.”

“Like Jensen?” 

Jared laughs. “Not Jensen. Jensen’s way more geek than me. Also, I’m pretty sure anybody who gave me grief would die of Jensen glaring holes through their skull.”

The popcorn finishes. On the way back up the stairs, Gen puts a lot of thought into that desperately important question: bed or futon? She can’t decide. Finally she puts it to Jared. “The bed’s more comfortable,” she says. “I have awesome pillows. But there’s more, um, room on the futon. We’re watching it on my laptop either way, so...”

“I mean, do you have a preference?” Jared asks, rubbing at the back of his neck.

“Well, yeah,” Gen says, before thinking it through.

“And?”

She was aiming for not-awkward, here. So much for that. “I’m supposed to be romancing you, not seducing you. It should probably be the futon.”

“Oh,” he breathes. He steps in a little closer. They’re maybe a foot apart now, and in this enclosed space the rich aroma of _omega_ is getting a little overwhelming. Or maybe it’s because Gen’s taking such deep breaths. “You could do both.”

Okay, now she can’t breathe at all. “I could?”

“Pretty sure those are non-exclusive activities,” he says solemnly.

“Because I’m trying to romance you,” she repeats.

He’s close enough now that his next words warm her forehead. “With microwave popcorn and movies in languages I don’t speak?”

“Shut up,” she says, staring up into his eyes. “I’ve never done it before.”

He licks his lips. “And the seducing?”

Gen bares her teeth. “I have done lots and lots of seducing.”

“Show me.”

“Okay,” she breathes.

Okay. 

Gen breathes in deep through her nose, savoring the richness of Jared’s scent. It fills her head like smoke uncoiling in a jar; it drops down into her belly like wine. She lifts her hands and lets them settle on his hip bones, just below the hem of his t-shirt. He is stock-still under her touch, and she sneaks a look upward to make sure he’s all right. His eyes are dark and fixed on her with laser focus, and if she is any judge, he is plenty all right.

“So let’s go,” Gen says, placing her hands firm against his chest and pushing, gentle but steady. She can’t keep from grinning. He takes one step back, then another, and then he’s backed up against her bunk. It just takes more firm push to sit him down, and finally, _finally_ he’s at a height she can work with. She slides her hands up under his ears, leans in, and puts her mouth on his.

Kissing Jared is every high school daydream Gen ever had rolled into one. He’s kissed enough to know _how_ to kiss, how to angle his head and catch her lips and explore her with his tongue, and he’s soft and warm and tastes like cinnamon gum – good thing they got to this before the popcorn, she thinks. She giggles into his mouth.

He pulls back a little and gives her the eye, and she just keeps on grinning. He shakes his head. “I didn’t know it’d be like this,” he said.

“Like what?” Jared’s neck is more interesting than any answer he could give. She puts her lips to that tender skin, nibbles oh so gently with her teeth, and enjoys the breath he sucks in.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be all, you know, girly.”

It takes a moment for this to penetrate. When it does, Gen pulls back. “What?”

“I mean, I’ve never been with an alpha girl before.”

Gen isn’t sure what to answer first. “Well, I _am_ alpha. And girly.”

“In bed, I mean.”

Gen draws back a little further. “What, am I not being girly now? What am I being?”

“ _Alpha_ ,” Jared repeats firmly.

It beats some of the alternatives. “And how do you feel about that?”

Jared’s grin stretches across his whole face. “Pretty awesome.”

Well, all right, then. A deep and unlusty warmth blooms in Gen’s chest.

She gets back to the business of applying her mouth to his neck. There’s plenty of it. As she gets near his jaw he shivers again, and she likes that a lot. “You smell so good,” she murmurs against his skin. Because he does: that deep rich odor of _omega_ that sends something thrumming in her gut every single time she passes one on the sidewalk, but so close now that the force of it rolls through her whole body, head to toe. 

“You’re not so bad yourself,” he says, a little hoarse. He lifts his head, leaving his throat open, unprotected, all hers.

He’s man, too, a little bit unwashed after a long day traipsing back and forth across campus, a little bit sour in a way that has Gen stiffening against his thigh. But no man Gen’s been with before ever bared his neck the way Jared did just now. “I have wanted this for so long,” she says. “You have no idea.”

His huff of laughter breaks in the middle. “Like for two whole weeks?”

Gen can’t help but shift back and forth against his thigh, looking for friction. There it is. “Like forever. You—” She breaks off with a gasp as she finds just the right angle. “You are what I’ve always wanted.”

Jared stiffens, and Gen thinks back over what she said. Crap. Too soon, Cortese. “Say again?” he says.

She could lie, but she doubts he’d believe her. “You’re what I’ve always wanted?” she ventures. “Sorry, that’s too much at once. Don’t let me interrupt the fucking.” She slides a hand towards Jared’s jaw, looking to angle in for another kiss, but Jared stops her and pulls back. The motion sets denim sliding across denim, right through Gen’s crotch, and she bites back a moan.

Then she gets a look at Jared’s face, and she doesn’t have to bite back anything anymore. His gaze is cool. “I’m not a what,” he says.

Gen blinks, chilled with vague but horrible premonition. “What?”

He lets go of her hand and gently disentangles the other one from around his neck. “I’m a who, not a what,” he says. “And I’m pretty well past the stage where I enjoy being a novelty fuck.”

“What? No!”

He gives her a long look. “No?”

“I want you because I like you.”

“Because I’m omega. An exotic new flavor of omega.”

“Hey!” Gen’s getting irritated now. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you went out with me because I’m alpha.”

His gaze flicks to the side. He won’t meet her eyes.

“The reason you’re all excited right now—” Gen gestures towards his erection, bulging in his jeans. “—is because I’m alpha, isn’t it?”

Jared swallows. His face is a conflict of emotions, all of them unhappy, no sign of that dimpled grin she already likes so much. “Oh.” A sort of slumping thaw overtakes him. “But, would you have even looked at me if I were beta?”

“Um. What?”

“It’s because I smell so awesome, right? That’s what got you interested.” The smirk that should accompany these words is missing.

Cautiously, Gen says, “If you’re asking me if I’m attracted to you because you are the kind of person I’m attracted to, then the answer is yes.” She steps around his knees and sits next to him on the bed. “For the record, that category also includes beta guys.” _But I like you better_ , she almost says, but maybe this isn’t the time.

“Oh.” Jared stares fixedly at his hands.

“Anyway, are you telling me you weren’t looking for someone who smelled like an alpha and fucked like a girl?” The sting of those words is sharper now.

That gets Jared looking at her again. “What? No! I...” He turns away again, a flush rising. “I like the way alphas fuck. And smell.”

“And girls?”

“Them, too. In theory.” He casts a sidelong glance at her. “I’ve never slept with one before.”

She snorts. “So which of us is whose novelty fuck, again?”

Jared keeps his hands knotted in his lap and doesn’t answer.

“I mean, I don’t care,” Gen says, even though that’s becoming less true as the conversation goes on. “There aren’t that many of me around, so I’ve been lots of peoples’ first girl alpha. It’s not so bad. Lot of variety.” She bumps shoulders with him. He doesn’t bump back.

“When you said you’d been waiting a long time... you meant for just any o-boy, right? Not for me.” 

The rank unfairness of this goads her. “And you’re telling me you wouldn’t have been willing to try out any girl alpha with decent hygiene? That the reason you’re sitting there half-dressed isn’t at least fifty percent curiosity, so you can answer that burning question, ‘Gee, how do alpha girls work?’”

He stares at her, clearly wobbling high up on a tightrope of feeling.

“Well, fuck you, because I _am_ girl, and I’m alpha, and I wanted to fuck you because I was pretty sure you were the best _thing_ —” She weights the word and feels a vicious thrill when his shoulders tighten. “—that’d ever happened to me. And—” The words slip out before she can stop them. “—I thought it was mutual.”

“Oh,” he says, very quietly.

Gen reaches behind her for Jared’s t-shirt, discarded on the bed, and hands it to him. “I won’t make you watch the German movie,” she says. “It’s probably dumb, anyway.”

“Okay,” Jared says. He stands, and all that height Gen was relishing a few minutes ago now just makes him seem very far away. At the door he stops. Without turning, he says, “For the record, I liked you, too.” And then he’s gone.

Gen doesn’t throw anything against the wall, because she is not that alpha cliché, but when the door’s shut, she puts her back to it, slides to the floor, and starts to cry, like every girl cliché in history.


	2. Chapter 2

Gen skips dinner. When Danneel gets back afterwards, Gen’s lying on her bed pretending to do math problems, but they keep swimming blurrily across the page, and who cares what the projection of this stupid vector onto this other stupid vector is, anyway?

“Gen?”

“Yeah.” She’s a little taken aback by the hoarseness of her own voice. She doesn’t look up.

“Are you okay?” Danneel’s getting closer.

Gen ducks her head. Her hair pools over her college-rule notepaper, not that that affects her problem-solving ability in any way. “I’m fine.” 

The bed dips as Danneel sits on it, near Gen’s ankles. “What happened?”

“It’s stupid,” Gen says, because if there’s one thing that she’s managed to determine through the last two hours of the entire conversation on loop, that’s it. 

“Jensen said Jared was upset? He wouldn’t tell me why.”

“He thought I just wanted him for sex,” Gen mumbles. “Because he was omega.”

Danneel clears her throat. “And you didn’t? Because I have to tell you, our room’s a little rank.”

“No!” Gen twists to glare at Danneel. “I mean, yeah, that was a draw, but that wasn’t all of it.” It was barely the beginning of it. “Sorry about the smell. I ran out of white-scent spray. ” Horny alpha is an odor with staying power. 

Danneel rolls her eyes. She reaches over and squeezes Gen’s calf. “So what happened then?”

“So I got mad. It wasn’t like he wanted me for anything else, either. I think...” Gen hesitates and then plows ahead. “I think I was more girl than he had in mind. Or more alpha. Or something.”

“Did he say that?” Danneel asks this in a tone that Gen long ago learned to classify as _deceptively mild_.

“Not exactly, but...” Gen’s vision starts blurring again. Danneel shifts over, and pretty soon she has her arms full of Gen, who’s trying to minimize the sniffling and not doing very well. “I really liked him.”

Danneel just holds on for a while, but eventually she ventures, “Maybe you guys could talk it out.”

“I don’t think so,” Gen says. God, she sounds all clogged and awful. “I think we kind of killed that possibility. He thought he was my novelty fuck.” 

“Aw, Gen.” Danneel rubs Gen’s shoulder. 

Gen pulls back and wipes ineffectually at her eyes. “Even if he were, would that have been so bad? It’s not like it’s never happened to _me_ before. I mean, it almost happened today, kind of.” And somehow, this time stung more than any of those others. She sniffles again. “Where does he get off? Like he wasn’t just in it for a dick in a pretty girly package. Apparently. And I’d have won him over, you know, too. I am _awesome_ in bed.”

Danneel’s laugh is shaky. She pulls Gen in for another hug, and Gen works hard not to dribble snot on Danneel’s shoulder.

\--

Gen barely pulls herself together before it’s time to meet the ladykillers. Half of her wants to beg off; her day already sucks, and she doubts quality ladykiller time will improve it. She can always tell Miner that she had a paper to write. But the other half of Gen desperately needs something, anything to focus on besides Jared. So she puts on black gym pants and a black t-shirt turned inside out to hide the screen-printing, borrows black sneakers from Danneel, and heads for Frakes. On the way there, she checks herself over; she straightens her posture and her features. Get yourself together, Cortese. You’ve got things to do.

She gets to the fire pit and discovers the tree-climbing crew isn’t just Canning and Miner. Gen should have known. Sampson’s there, no surprise, and Benz, too, which is; Gen would’ve thought Benz had better, more mature things to do, alpha or no. 

Miner throws an approving grin in Gen’s direction. “Told you she’d show.” 

Gen isn’t warmed by that approval, because she doesn’t need it. She is _alpha_ \- even if it’s a little hard to remember it after the day Gen’s had. It’s especially hard to remember while faced with Sampson, stalking tall and certain, the alpha Gen would be were she _an entirely different person_ , and Benz, who somehow finds it so easy to smile at the world from under her lashes while ruling it via a good stern grip on its balls.

“Ladies,” Miner says, grinned wickedly. Then she takes a few steps back, towards the woods that ring this part of campus, and she’s gone. They follow her, one after the other. In the dusk they’re shadows, all in black. Even Benz’s bright blond hair is tucked under a knit cap. Ninjas, Gen would like to think, although the thought feels a little silly. 

Still, she creeps into the woods with a certain sense of ceremony.

They step lightly through the undergrowth. It misted lazily yesterday for a couple of hours and the sky hasn’t cleared since, so the ground is damp, wetly silent under their feet. Gen ends up foot to heel with Benz. Benz tosses Gen a smile that gleams whitely even in this murky forested dusk. 

They suffer a few tense moments while they wait for some other group of students to crash through the brush in front of them. There’s giggling, male and female both; it sounds like a not particularly focused round of hide-and-seek. The intruders are gone soon enough, and the alphas creep on.

They work their way halfway around the hill that way, parallel to woods’ edge and maybe thirty feet into it, until the edge takes a sharp turn in front of them, and there beyond it is the signal oak. It’s massive. It’s older than any building on campus and taller than most of them. It stretches up and up, and from this angle, in this deepening late-evening light, its branches seem to touch the clouds a mile above.

Miner lifts a hand: _wait_. 

There are loiterers. An entire gaggle of students sits underneath it on a picnic blanket, illuminated by bright bulbs shining from the wrought-iron light posts lining the sidewalk. Gen smells the remains of pizza gone cold. Miner motions to the left, and the group edges the clearing behind a thin screen of brush. They circle until they are exactly opposite the group of late picnickers, and Miner gestures them to a halt. Now they wait.

“So you’re living with omegas now.” It’s Sampson, right in Gen’s ear.

“Yeah.”

“How’s that?” Sampson’s every inflection is innuendo; verbalizing it would be redundant.

“Horny,” Gen allows. It’s halfway true. She does not lack for jerk-off fodder, when she wants it; all she has to do is stick her head out into the hall and take a good deep whiff. The rest of the time, though, Holmen is already just _home_. She doesn’t know how to explain that part.

“I guess you won’t have any trouble finding company for heat week.”

“Haven’t ever before,” Gen returns. Sampson shrugs.

Miner shushes them.

The loiterers keep on loitering. A lighter flares briefly, and shortly after, tobacco smoke drifts past Gen’s nose. Beside her, Sampson fidgets. “Couldn’t we just scare ‘em off?” Sampson whispers.

“Not very stealthy.” Nor is a well-lit corner of a well-populated campus a place likely to give people jumpy nerves, however dark the night. Still. There’s gotta be something to break up that inertia. Streaking, say. 

Inactivity itches under Gen’s skin. If she doesn’t do something soon, she’s going to start thinking again. She creeps towards Miner, crouched at the border’s edge. When Gen gets there, she whispers, “We could go around the back.” She points. Opposite the picnickers, the oak is shadowed and unlit, and a branch hangs down just low enough for a person to climb on, if someone gave her a lift. “Canning or someone can give me a boost.”

Miner peers past her finger into the gloom. “Maybe—”

A pair gets up from the group and stumbles away from the picnic blanket, around to the back side of the tree. The alpha presses the omega up against the bark. Pretty soon he’s trying to swallow her mouth, from the sound of it.

“Crap,” Gen whispers.

Miner huffs, and then she taps on Gen’s shoulder. Silently, like ninjas, the alphas edge back from the clearing and into the woods.

It’s a subdued cadre of ladykillers that troop back out into the clearing behind Frakes. “Next time,” Miner promises them.

Sampson turns to Gen. “We’re doing hot chocolate. You’re coming, right?”

Despite her misgivings, there are aspects of the Frakes lady posse that Gen doesn’t mind. This automatic inclusion, this breezy expectation of belonging is one of them. “Why not.”

\--

Sampson’s the RA this year, although she’s only a junior. Gen makes surprised noises about this, and Sampson shrugs. “I wanted it.” This is a fact about Sampson: she rarely fails to get what she wants. Her single is tiny, though. They stop by to pick up ‘supplies,’ as Sampson calls whatever she has stowed away in her paper bag, and then they all end up in Benz’s room, where Chikezie is studying. Her eyebrows rise as she surveys them all trooping in, and then she picks up her massive textbook and heads for the door.

“She’s studying for the MCAT,” Benz explains, and everyone nods in sympathy. For Benz, probably.

Benz pulls out her water heater, which is not allowed in the dorms, but Sampson doesn’t bat an eye. Instead, while Benz takes the jar down the hall to fill it with water in the bathroom, Sampson pulls out her supplies: two bottles, one of coconut syrup and one of butterscotch Schnapps. Alcohol: really, really not allowed in the dorms. Or anywhere else on campus, for that matter.

“Some RA you are,” Gen says, blinking.

“Aren’t I though,” Sampson agrees.

Gen sits cross-legged on the floor, her back braced against the bed frame. Sampson settles next to her, cross-legged, too, although somehow she makes it look zen rather than school girl-ish. Benz comes back and sets the water on to heat. Miner pulls out coffee mugs borrowed from the caf and packets of instant hot chocolate and passes them around. 

“So, you meet any interesting new omegas in Holmen?” Sampson asks.

Gen’s grip tightens around her empty mug. “Um.”

“She met a new omega, all right,” Canning says from behind her. She’s sprawled out across the bottom bunk. She always was a sprawler. “One of the new o-boys.”

Sampson whistles appreciatively. “Dipping into the freshman pond, are we?”

“He transferred in,” Gen says defensively, although she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t need to defend herself. Or Jared.

“So tell us,” Benz says, in that sweet, quiet voice that brooks no argument. She smiles encouragingly at Gen, like that will help.

“He transferred in, and we had a couple of dates. That’s all.”

“But are you _still_ dating?” Canning asks. “Let’s be honest, that’s what we really want to know. For reasons.”

“Except for me,” Miner says. “I have an omega, thanks.”

Gen scowls into her empty coffee mug. “Not so much. Look, I don’t really want to talk about it.”

Sampson looks ready to follow up on that, but Benz interrupts, “Water’s ready. Hand over your mugs.”

They do, one after the other. After everyone stirs their chocolate mix in and their cups all hold something approximating a beverage, Sampson passes around the bottle of Schnapps. “To better luck next time,” she says. 

Gen very carefully dribbles a tablespoon or so into her mug. There was an incident last year where her chocolate tasted more like butterscotch than chocolate. It’s still too sweet, but that’s half the point, she thinks. And underneath the sweet is a very faint burn that’s the most booze she’s had since she got to campus.

Miner says, “Glad you showed, Cortese. It hasn’t been the same without you, you know.”

“It’s true,” Benz agrees.

Gen glances back and forth between them. She’s never known either of them to be cruel, despite the usual alpha bitch stereotype. She’s been off-balance all evening, though, and if they wanted to go in for the kill, now would be the time. “What about the freshmen?”

“There are six,” Sampson. “Six brand new ladykillers in a class of eight hundred and fifty. The odds went flooey somewhere.”

“So much for diversity,” Miner says. “Anyway, it’s not like any of them can replace you, Cortese. I’ve never lived with any of them.”

Gen doesn’t scoff. She doesn’t tell them how replaceable she knows she is. Probably all six of those new additions are better alphas than her. Taller and tougher, more interested in sports. She glances down at her mug; it’s still half full. She chugs it, and then she pushes to her feet. “I gotta go,” she says. “Chem test.” Next week, but it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about Pellegrino’s tests in advance.

“You’ll come see us, won’t you?” Benz asks. Hell if Gen doesn’t think she might be sincere.

“I can try.” It’s not quite a promise. 

The alphas wave her goodbye. Gen walks herself out the lobby and into the now-chilly night. The memory of her afternoon doesn’t come crashing down on her, and she doesn’t mash her face into her newly-damp pillow when she gets home. Nope.

\--

The next evening, Jensen shows up alone at their usual table. He eyes Gen coolly, and she eyes him back, bristling at the implied challenge to back down but still too shaken to ask him about Jared. Eventually Jared does show up, ten minutes after Gen and Danneel and Jensen are already settled. He scarfs down his hamburger at record speed without saying much to any of them, even Jensen, and when he’s done he excuses himself with some mention of a lab report to write. On a Friday night.

Gen stays focused on her beef and broccoli stir fry. She can feel Jensen looking at her, but he doesn’t say anything, and eventually Danneel gets him talking about the project in the history class they’re both taking, and that’s that.

\--

Those two weeks where she got to thinking of Jared as sort of hers, in the future tense if not the present, has upset her whole balance. Now each minute concern of Danneel and Jensen’s glacial unromance grates on Gen. This is totally unfair to Danneel, and Gen tries to hide it. Ditto her feelings about Adrianne and Aldis, the couple too gorgeous to be true. Nobody’s ever looked at Gen the way Aldis looks at Adrianne and vice versa, except maybe for a few blissed-out seconds post-orgasm.

Gen doesn’t care. She reminds herself of this. Repeatedly. 

She goes to her classes and does the reading for history – which is damned unlike her, but whatever, ancient Roman graffiti is way more interesting than the thoughts than anything else she might have to think about right now. She figures out projections of vectors onto other vectors and moves onto quadric surface: paraboloids and hyperboloids that are really only conceivable via the math lab’s three-dimensional software, and barely then. 

Jensen still eats with them regularly, and while he’s not voluble with Gen, his initial coolness thaws. Gen is more grateful than she’d know how to say; if her own dumb romantic failures had screwed up Danneel’s relationship, Gen doesn’t know what she’d have done. Danneel would forgive her, probably, which would make it even worse.

Jared even comes occasionally. Then he and Gen both spend their meals staring at their plates, and it’s up to Adrianne to goad Jensen into such heated discussions as the one contrasting the merits of the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime, the new one, and the manga.

Despite what Gen told Danneel, she wonders if maybe there are words that can fix this. She thinks over lots of possible combinations. _I’m sorry_ is the obvious one but seems cheap and too easy and not even entirely true; half of what she said, she’s not sorry for. Calling him out for looking at her like she’s some kind of curiosity? Yeah, she’d do that again in a heartbeat. _Still friends_ isn’t any truer; she’s too raw for friendship just now. 

Still. This careful not-talking is not only painfully awkward but surely a bummer for all the innocent bystanders. For their sake as much as anyone’s Gen determines she has to say something.

The next evening, as everyone gets up to leave, Gen hangs back long enough to catch Jared’s eye. He lets Jensen and Danneel and Adrianne go on ahead. “Yeah?” he says. He doesn’t look... angry, anymore, at least not with that brittle coldness like Gen saw before.

“Look,” she begins, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Or, or make you feel used. I’d never want to do that.”

He sort of shuffles in place. “I know.”

“Yeah, well, I’m kind of pissed that you thought I would.” Jared’s eyes widen. “Especially seeing as we’re kind of in the same boat, here.” She gestures uselessly between them, like that’ll illustrate what boat she means. Not that Jared seems to see the commonalities she does anyway.

He stares at her, looking a little wounded, and that’s not something Gen is willing to deal with right now. He can just go on looking wounded, for all she cares. Really.

“Anyway, I guess I’m not quite what you were looking for.” His mouth opens and closes again, but he doesn’t contradict her. She didn’t expect he would. She hoped, maybe. A tiny private hope, now to be locked away in a drawer and forgotten. “So, no hard feelings?”

“No! No hard feelings. I shouldn’t... I’ve got a hair trigger about some things.”

Gen snorts. “Yeah, well, me too.”

Jared gives her a tentative smile. They take their trays to the dish line and put them in the rack, and then they wave awkward goodbyes, and Gen doesn’t feel any better.

\--

On Friday afternoon, Gen gives up. She gets the campus operator on the phone, and he connects her to Miner and Chikezie’s room. Miner answers.

“Do you have plans tonight?” Gen asks without preamble.

“Me and some of the girls are going into town for dinner. Why? You want to come?”

“Please God yes.”

\--

She gets to Miner’s dorm room at five. Benz and Sampson are already there. Gen didn’t realize they’d joined the regular Miner posse – she’d have thought they’d mostly be hanging with the juniors – but tonight she doesn’t care. She’s in too much of a funk to be overawed by anyone, she’s pretty certain.

Chikezie comes, too. When Gen expresses her surprise, all Chikezie says is, “Beer cheese soup.” Fair enough.

They walk down the hill together, the five of them, and despite herself Gen is buoyed a little by the absolute confidence of alphas walking shoulder to shoulder. She rides the crest of that confidence all the way to Lars Brothers’, where Chikezie orders her soup and everyone else gets hot sandwiches and sodas. They choose a booth and slide into its unpadded wooden seats. It’s not so bad. Gen’s having trouble remembering why she’s been avoiding the ladykillers all this time. 

However, if she thought they’d be a refuge from matters romantic, she was sorely mistaken. “Her name’s Lindsey,” Benz tells them. She looks uncharacteristically shy as she describes a lit major with dark hair and dark, serious eyes who sits two seats over in Benz's geology class.

“So, heat buddy?” Sampson asks, sipping from her soda.

Benz wrinkles her nose. “Some people are looking for more than just sex, Sampson.”

Gen barely hides a flinch. Or maybe not; Miner is eyeing her speculatively.

Sampson rolls her shoulders, unconcerned. She is possibly the most unconcerned person Gen has ever met. “We can’t give you love and rhetoric without sex. Sex is compulsory.”

Gen’s lost. Chikezie snorts at her soda. “Stop butchering the words of smarter people than you.”

Sampson is one of the more unapologetic people Gen’s ever met, too. She grins. “You telling me sex isn’t compulsory?”

“I like sex,” Miner says, and takes a huge bite of her sandwich. 

This comment naturally requires a lot of ribbing about Miner’s newly acquired omega friend, a girl Gen’s met a few times – she lived on the same hall as Danneel last year. Nicki. Miner grins through it all good-naturedly, smug as a cat.

“What about you and that o-boy?” Sampson asks Gen eventually. “Anything else happen with that?”

“No.” Gen scowls at her plate. There’s nothing left on it but crumbs.

“You looking for a screw? I can hook you up.”

Gen rolls her eyes. “I can find my own screws, thanks.”

“I know what you want,” Miners says.

“Oh really.” Gen is deeply skeptical.

“What you want—” Miner pauses dramatically. “—is booze.”

“Oh?” Gen asks cautiously.

“Yep,” Sampson agrees. “Over at Shackleford, for example. I’ve got a friend whose house is throwing a bash tonight.” She pushes to her feet. Everyone else follows. Gen is last, once she realizes the exodus is happening.

“It’ll be fun,” Miner wheedles, as if Gen weren’t half-sold on the word ‘booze’ alone.

“And very low-key,” Sampson adds. “It won’t get busted.” Not that Sampson would care so very much about that; she’s legal. Benz, too, for that matter.

“ _I_ am going back to campus,” Chikezie announces. “I have studying to do.”

Miner slaps Chikezie lightly upside the shoulder. “It’s Friday night.”

Chikezie ignores her and turns to Gen. “Cortese? You with them or me?”

“Lead me to the booze,” Gen says.

Miner grins and drops her arm around Gen’s shoulders.

The walk to Shackleford is raucous, Sampson and Miner already tipsy on anticipation alone. Gen hangs behind with Benz. Gen never has a lot to say to Benz. Benz gleams with alpha poise and upperclassmen confidence and smiles with a monarch’s beneficence, and how do you _talk_ to that? So Gen doesn’t. Gen walks the sloping streets up to Shackleford and tries to silence all her second thoughts.

Sampson’s friend’s house is just off campus proper, a multi-level old place with a porch that wraps all the way around. Despite Sampson’s description, _low-key_ isn’t really the description Gen would use for what’s happening in it now. The lawn is crawling with students, some of whom have clearly already been imbibing a while. Every window is lit, and sound rumbles dully from within.

Miner takes Gen by the arm, as if she’s afraid the mere sight of a party will send Gen scurrying, and they make their way to the front door.

Outside was crowded; inside feels like a mosh pit, the air heavy with sweat and alcohol fumes. Pretty soon Gen and Miner have beery plastic cups of their own. Miner chugs hers and makes a face; Gen tries hers and has to agree. A person would have to be really motivated to get drunk on it. Half an hour ago, Gen felt plenty motivated; now she’s not so sure.

“I’m going to find some good stuff,” Miner yells. “Wait here.” She turns and pushes her way through the people.

The crowd is like an ocean, the waves of it endlessly pushing back and forth and back. Stillness is impossible. Gen can’t be bothered to fight the current, and it carries her inexorably into the next room. From there she spots a door hanging open, letting the night air in. She elbows her way to it and steps out.

She’s on a porch somewhere to the side of the house. Five feet to her right, a beta couple is undulating against the side of the house, attached at the mouth.

Gen doesn’t want to begrudge someone else their good time, and she hates the acidic jealousy that burns in her chest. She hunches her shoulders and turns the other way, walking until she reaches a porch swing that is miraculously empty. The ceiling squeaks in protest as she sits down. She freezes, ready to jump out of the way should beams start falling, but they don’t, and after a few moments she settles onto the swing and starts it swaying.

She tastes the beer again. It’s still gross. She swallows it all down in one gulp and sets the plastic cup aside.

She can see across the river from here. There on the opposite hill is Landingham, and there are all twelve stories of Petersen, whose roof marks the highest point in the county. Its windows glow with checkerboard brightness. Holmen’s a bit nearer, but its three stories are hidden behind the trees on the quad. Anyway, Gen and Danneel’s bedroom is on the back side; Gen couldn’t see it from here in any case.

“Hey, there.” 

Gen turns to find a guy looking at her. When their eyes meet, he smirks with unhurried but lively interest. She takes a sniff without even thinking. Beta.

“Mind if I sit?” He’s still smirking, like he knows the answer will be yes. 

Gen shrugs. The chains creak under his weight, and Gen tenses again, but apparently the swing is secured much better than it likes to let on. 

“I notice your cup is empty. I could fix that for you.”

“I’m good, thanks,” Gen says.

“I should check – are you waiting for someone?”

Gen snorts. Apparently this is sufficient answer, because the guy pulls out a hundred-watt grin, complete with lots of very white teeth.

He’s attractive enough: blond beyond blond, like half the people in this state, with lashes so pale they nearly disappear. He’s not especially Gen’s type – she’s not thinking about what her type might be, about long lean limbs and shaggy hair and dimples, because she doesn’t _have_ a type – but she can always close her eyes.

“You seem like a guy who knows what he wants,” she says. 

He mulls this over and grins. “I’d say I do, yeah.”

Let off a little steam with a willing body: hardly her worst possible course of action. “I like that in my hook-ups.”

His eyebrows rise, appreciative. “Oh, yeah?”

“Mm.” Gen shifts a little closer to his end of the swing. He watches her progress avidly. She takes another sniff – beer, yeah, but more on his breath than in his pores, and his eyes are clear enough. Old Spice, yesterday’s undershirt, pizza grease. Staleness, too, like he’s been shut up in some attic too long – or a practice room in Shackleford’s music hall. Gen slides another six inches. Now they’re touching, knee to knee. Gen palms over his thigh and then leans in for a taste.

Well. Beer and pizza – what did she expect? But he knows what to do with his lips and his tongue, and underneath the flavors of food he tastes _human_ , which is Gen’s favorite of all.

He’s missing something, though. She doesn’t let herself consider what it might be. She pulls back and coolly observes the flush on his cheeks. She takes his hand in both of hers, and she guides it down between her thighs and up under the hem of her skirt. She shivers at the touch, but that’s not the point; the point is when he realizes what he’s touching and his eyes widen.

“Whaddya say, champ?” she asks. It’s more taunt than offer.

“I’m game,” he says. There’s a new light in his eyes, now. 

Whatever Gen wanted from him, that wasn’t it. “Forget it.” She shoves his hand away from her.

“Aw, come on—”

“I said no.”

He pleads a little, grumbles a little, but eventually he goes away with something like grace, and Gen’s alone. After ten minutes or so, she concludes that it wouldn’t have mattered what he said or how he responded. He wasn’t what she wanted, was all. Damn it. God, she sucks at being alpha. If she _were_ worth her dick, she’d go find some nice girl to cozy up with for the night, or the weekend – someone soft and warm and scented of omega. 

Instead, Gen gets up and starts walking. She stops on Main Street for a milk shake – chocolate peanut butter with malt. Once she has the to-go cup in her hands, chilling her skin, she realizes that she doesn’t want to go back to her dorm room. Danneel’s probably there, in which case she’ll want to hear about Gen’s evening, or else she isn’t there, which means Gen will end up watching unfunny sitcom reruns and going to bed early. But she doesn’t want to just sit someplace, either; wasn’t that what she was just doing?

She takes her shake and follows the sidewalk to the bridge. The glow of the street lamps bounce from the surface of dark, placid waters. They're still running low after the long summer heat. 

The last time she stood on this bridge, it was with Jared. The memory is soured now. “God, I’m an idiot,” Gen tells the river. It doesn’t say anything back.

By the time she finishes her shake, she’s cold; the denim jacket she’s wearing over her dress isn’t enough to protect against cool air outside _and_ ice cream inside. Goose pimples have risen all up and down her legs. She buttons the jacket shut and heads back toward campus, feeling no wiser than when she left it.

\--

When Gen gets to lunch the next day, she’s already about to sit at the usual table when she realizes Jared is sitting in the far corner of it. She stops short; she could go find Miner, maybe. Then Jared glances up and spots her. Crap. Now it’d be awkward to change direction, so she goes and sits down in the chair in the opposite corner from him. “Jensen?” she asks.

“Coming, I think? What about Danneel?”

“She has a project,” Gen says. “Adrianne’ll probably show up soon.” Jared nods. Gen applies herself to her soup. After a couple of minutes, though, she asks, “So, how are classes?”

“Fine,” he assured her. “Yours?”

“They’re good. Hard. 3D math is evil.”

“I stopped at calc II.”

“Smart.”

“Yeah, well.” Jared sniffs at his salad. “Now I just have to read a lot.”

Gen nods. She glances around for Adrianne, but she’s nowhere in sight. Did she say she had a choir thing today?

“Gen?”

She looks up. Jared is eyeing her cautiously. “Yeah.”

“What did you mean when you said you hadn’t romanced someone before?”

It takes Gen a moment to realize what he’s talking about; she has to think back to that sweaty disastrous lust-filled afternoon that she’s mostly tried to block from her memory. Then she has to decide if she feels like answering. But Jared looks earnest and a little bit anxious, and, well. It’s not like Gen’s private about this stuff. “I haven’t really dated anyone before.”

He blinks. “What, seriously? But you’re...”

Gen doesn’t know where he’s going. She’s a little afraid to find out. She swallows another spoon of soup – lime curry, thanks a lot, caf – and waits.

“You’re really, um, comfortable with sex,” Jared says finally.

Gen shrugs. “I’ve had a lot of it.”

“But you don’t date.”

“I haven’t before, but I mean, I was dating you. I thought.” 

Jared hastens, “Yes. Yes, we were dating. But if you weren’t dating, then, sex...?”

“Um, heat week? You’re an omega; you know what that’s like. And some hook-ups. Betas. When I can find a guy who’s interested.”

Jared snorts. “Yeah, I never really have that problem.”

“No?”

He shrugs. “Big, boney guy they can hold down and fuck like a girl? I don’t have much trouble getting laid, if that’s all I want.”

“Oh,” Gen says. She doesn’t know quite what to do with that, other not mention how recently it was that she wanted very badly to hold him down and fuck him. It seems impolitic just now.

“Why, is it different for you?” he asks curiously.

“I’m a little tiny girl who wants to fuck them like if I were a guy. I have limited appeal.”

“Oh.” Jared sounds embarrassed.

“I mean, it’s not always like that. I’ve gone both ways.” Jared looks puzzled. Gen clarifies, “I’ve let guys fuck me before, too.” His eyes widen into an expression she’s not sure how to read. “But anyway, omegas like me, because apparently I’m non-threatening.”

Jared snorts. Off Gen’s incredulous look, he says, “I’m known alpha guys that were pussycats compared to you.”

Gen blinks, unsure how to take this. When Jared smiles, a little uncertainly, she decides it’s a compliment. “Yeah, well. Heat weeks are good weeks, anyway.”

“But you’ve never dated.”

“What are you, dog with bone? No, I’ve never dated. I mean, there was a couple of weeks with this one beta guy, which are better left forgotten, I promise you. And another couple of weeks with my best friend from high school, whom I still love to pieces. I just have no lusty feelings for him, it turns out. But other than that...” Gen shrugs sharply, her shoulders tense from the direction this conversation has taken. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...” Jared trails off and frowns at his salad. “I was just wondering why me. Was it really just the omega thing?” He doesn’t look angry, like he did the last time. He just looks _sad_. All Gen’s ire melts away. She’d do anything to take that slump out of his shoulders. 

“I mean, kind of, at first?” Jared nods, like he gets it, and Gen knows he doesn’t. “But it’s not just that.”

“No?”

“No.” Gen tries to think how to put this so it doesn’t sound stupid, and finally gives up. “I thought you’d get where I was coming from, a little? More than most people.” She shrugs. “About being a freak, I mean.” 

Jared’s stares pensively down at his salad. Crap, what’d she say now? But what he says is, “Jensen says I’ve been sort of an ass to you about the alpha girl thing.”

Gen eyes him suspiciously. “Which alpha girl thing?”

“The, uh. The thing where I kept making a big deal out of it.”

She can feel her expression souring. “No, it’s fine. It’s cool.”

“No! I mean, it’s not cool. Like you said, you’d think I’d know better, since I’m cross-sex, too. For some reason, that doesn’t automatically save me from being dumb about other people.” He shrugs an apologetic, lopsided shrug. “You were right about me. I did agree to go out with you because you were alpha.”

Gen supposes she should feel a certain justification right now. It doesn’t really take.

Jared continues, “I’m not as flexible as you. Alphas are pretty much it for me. But you know I said I passed for beta for a while, before I primed?” Gen nods. “Yeah, so, part of that was liking girls. After I primed, I was pretty screwed up for a while. I’d look at this beta girl I liked and there was just nothing.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. So it wasn’t that I was just curious about, you know, she-alphas. I was hoping maybe you’d be the best of both worlds. Girl _and_ someone I could want to have sex with.”

“And?” Gen can barely get the word out.

Jared grimaces. “And it turns out you’re a person instead.”

“...Oh.” Gen considers this and ventures, “Damn it?”

“Yeah. The shoe’s never been on the other foot for me before. So, I’m sorry to you, too. Really.”

“It’s, uh. It’s okay.”

“Okay.” Jared ducks his head, and his hair falls down into his eyes. “Okay.”

“For what it’s worth, I really am sorry, too. Maybe I did treat you like a ‘what,’ a little.” She can admit that, now that she’s given it some thought. “I didn’t mean to. But it still sucks, and I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

Silence descends. A minute or so later, Gen asks about Jared’s preferences for local cuisine – which is to say, would he take Lars Brothers or the square pizza place to a desert island with him – and then he asks about Idaho and skiing. “Well, for starters, we have actual mountains.” And by the time Danneel scurries over at twelve forty-five with a lunch she has to finish by one, Jared and Gen are conversing like ordinary people.

\--

So they’re talking now. That’s nice.


	3. Chapter 3

Miner catches Gen in the pizza line the next night. “We’re trying again. Next week.”

It takes Gen a moment to catch up. “The...” She sidles in closer. “The signal oak?”

“Yeah. And you’re in this now, Cortese. Skipping out is not an option.”

“That’s not ominous or anything.”

Miner rolls her eyes, and all seriousness is lost. “Come on, you know you wanna come.”

Gen takes a moment to pick out a slice of pepperoni and one of veggie. “You always act like I never do anything with you guys. I went to a party with you last week.” 

“Which you ditched in the first ten minutes.” Miner selects her own pizza and follows Gen out to the soda fountain. “You’re cagey,” Miner says. “It’s always even odds whether you’ll come with us at all. And don’t even give me crap about homework or whatever.”

Gen slides her tray onto the rack with more than necessary force. “Fine, I’ll go.”

Miner snorts. “Don’t do me any favors.”

Gen turns on her, and Miner takes a step back. Gen ought to be gratified by that. “What do you want from me?” Gen demands. “You want me to go climb the fucking tree and prove I’m worth my fucking dick, or what?”

Miner’s mouth twists a funny shape, like she’s holding in a comment about Gen’s ‘fucking dick.’ “You don’t have to,” she says finally. “I just figured you’d want to come. You know, finish what we started. Or whatever.”

“I’ve got stuff,” Gen says, and leaves.

\--

Gen and Danneel and Jensen and Jared are having a movie night. This plan was formed without any input from Gen. Not that she’s opposed, exactly; Jared’s been showing up to a lot more group mealtimes lately, and they’ve been a lot less awkward. 

They decide over dinner to watch _Awake in Spain_ , because somehow Danneel never has before, which Gen will be giving her crap about for _years_. Gen tidies her half of the dorm room for the first time since the semester started and hides all her laundry under the bed. Danneel looks on, amused.

The boys show up promptly at seven. Jensen scoots over next to Danneel to give Jared room on the futon. “It’s only the definitive adventure-romance of the eighties,” Jensen tells Danneel as Gen slides the disc in.

“Because you’re an expert on eighties adventure-romances?” Danneel asks, skeptical. Gen sprawls out on the lower bunk and props her head on a pillow.

“I know enough to know which the good ones are,” he says loftily. Danneel rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. This was a good idea, Gen thinks. 

It’s even better once she realizes that Jensen knows this movie as well as she does and can quote it right along with her. For the first two minutes, anyway, at which point Jared fumbles for the remote, pauses, and declares that it _isn’t fair_ trying to watch something the first time while people echo it in your ear. He gives Gen and Jensen the evil eye, and Danneel calls Jared her champion, which makes him blush. 

At the halfway mark, just after the count leaps off the tower onto the stinging vines and slides down them, whispering ‘ouch’ the whole way, Jared grumbles, “I’m hungry.”

“There’s popcorn,” Gen offers, a little anxious. Popcorn hasn’t fared well in their relationship thus far.

“Sounds good.”

By some devious strategy, Gen’s the one who ends up taking the popcorn down to the dorm kitchen. When she gets back, Jared’s telling Danneel, “Yeah, you totally should.”

“Should what?” Gen asks. She opens the popcorn bag into a bowl.

“They think I should go to an O So Awesome meeting,” Danneel says.

Gen pauses. “The omega pride thing?”

“It’s more of an activist organization,” Jared says.

“You go?” Gen asks, a little bit surprised. “I didn’t know you were involved in that.” Not that Gen knows very much about it, period. If it weren’t for posters, she wouldn’t even recognize the name.

Jared surprises her by turning shifty, his eyes avoiding hers. “I didn't know if I would be.” Jared rubbed at the back of his neck. “I was in something similar in high school. It helped.”

“Oh?”

“A lot of o-boys end up at those things.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. It was nice to have company, you know? Once I was willing to be seen with them, I mean.”

“With o-boys?” Danneel asks.

He wrinkles his nose at her. “I, uh. I was sort of weird in high school, about being omega.” Gen envies him a little for that adolescent freakout – mostly for it being _adolescent_. As in, in the past and over now. 

Danneel says, “What about now?”

“I’m good now. More or less.” He shrugs. “Anyway, you should come. It’s Thursday night. There’ll be pizza.” He smiles hopefully, and that alone would have done Gen in. That boyish grin is deadly; it hones right in on the most vulnerable parts of her and melts them into goo. But it’s not Gen he’s asking.

Bu then Danneel says, “Can Gen come, too?”

“Yeah, sure, if she wants.”

“I’m not omega,” Gen protests. 

“It’s omegas and allies,” Jared says. “The omegas are the one who talk, but everyone’s welcome, if they’re interested.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t have to. We can talk about it later,” Danneel tells Gen, but Gen knows what that means. Danneel wants Gen for moral support, and Danneel’s hopeful look is hardly less lethal than Jared’s. 

\--

Knudsen’s lounge is warm and close, full of bodies: mostly omega, some beta, a handful of alphas. White-scent spray permeates the room, but it isn’t quite enough to mask the fact that there is a high concentration of people here with whom Gen would enjoy a thorough roll in the hay. Or her dick would, anyway. Shallow breaths, Cortese.

Jared spots Gen and Danneel almost as soon as they get in the door. Despite being on campus barely a month, he already seems to know everyone in the room, and he’s determined to introduce Danneel to all of them. 

Once Gen and Danneel are appropriately supplied with greasy paper plates covered in cheese, Jared settles them on a sofa with some guys Gen doesn’t know. Other omegas, Gen quickly realizes. Jared introduces them as DJ and Chuck. “It’s _Charles_ , man, or I will end you.” Jared talks with them like old friends, for all that he’s only known them three weeks. It’s Gen’s opportunity to sit back and take stock. DJ is a scrawny mouse of a guy with a grin as genuine as Gen has ever seen – besides Jared’s, anyway. Charles, on the other hand, is a fine, fine specimen of manhood. He fits the petite, effeminate image of an o-boy about as well as Jared does. Which is to say, not at all.

Shallow breaths, Genevieve.

An omega girl gets up and welcomes everyone. A few different people talk about the club, both the omega-only branch and the allies branch. Upcoming events are announced. Cupcakes get talked about a lot; apparently they are Charles’ contribution to the usual Awesome Omega festivities.

Eventually they’re all broken up into groups by a numbering system. Jared stays where he is on the sofa, and Gen has to go find the 3s on the other side of the room. Jared shrugs apologetically, but it’s fine; Gen is a big girl. Much to her surprise, when she gets to her fellow 3s, one of them is Benz. “Hi,” Gen says. 

“Hey,” Benz says. “Come sit.” She pats the floor next to her.

Gen sits. “What are you doing here?” 

“My sister asked me,” Benz says. “New freshman, you know.”

“Right.” Gen does vaguely remember.

“And you?”

“I’m, uh.” Gen gestures vaguely in Jared’s direction. “I’m with a friend. You’ve heard me talk about Danneel.”

“Oh, yeah. Neat,” Benz says. Gen shrugs. She supposes Benz probably means it. One of the many ways that Benz is so hard to live up to is that she’s always so _sincere_ about everything. When Gen doesn’t say anything else, Benz adds, “You should come hang out with the alphas again soon.”

“Oh?”

“We play frisbee every week now.”

“Maybe,” Gen hedges.

Benz looks at her steadily until Gen looks away. “Do you not like us?” Benz asks finally. “Is there someone you don’t get along with?”

Gen snorts. “Well, Cherise.”

Benz grimaces sympathetically. It took Gen a while to realize it, but _no one_ on the she-alpha corridor liked Gen’s original freshman roommate. Nor does anyone seem to be sorry that she didn’t come back this year. “But it isn’t us," Benz clarifies.

“I like you guys fine,” Gen says. Benz waits, and finally Gen adds, “I just don’t see what you need me for.”

Benz’s eyebrows peak delicately. “It’s not a matter of need. It’s nice when we alpha women stick together. That’s all.”

“But I’m nothing like you guys,” Gen blurts, and is immediately sorry.

“What are we like?”

“You’re all... perfect.” Gen gestures towards Benz. “Confident and in charge. The world is your oyster. Miner and Chikezie are pre-med—”

“But so were you,” Benz points out.

“—and _you’re_ going to go get a PhD in education and become dean of some college somewhere, and Sampson’s going to fuck her way through the entire campus omega population and then get her business degree and make six figures her first year out.”

“You’re studying chemistry,” Benz says. “That’s not a slacker major.”

“I’m too short, and I like guys even though only two and a half percent of them are omega, and I don’t know what the hell I’m _doing_. With anything.” Gen’s wailing a little bit now. She tries to keep the volume down.

“Miner’s no taller than you are. Neither am I, for that matter.” Before Gen can find a response to that, Benz continues, “But more to the point, we’re not perfect. _I’m_ not perfect.”

Gen makes a face. “Pretty sure you are.”

“I’m fucking _not_ ,” Benz says, so fiercely that Gen would have been cowed to silence even without the shock of Benz swearing. Benz takes a deep breath, visibly composing herself, and says, “I like spending time with other alpha women because they struggle with what I struggle with. We make more sense together than we do by ourselves. And I’d like that for you.” She reaches out and rests her hand on Gen’s shoulder. “It sounds like maybe you have some things you’re trying to make sense of.”

“Thanks,” Gen mumbles, well beyond uncomfortable. Benz seems to sense it; she pulls her hand away and gives Gen a warm, private smile.

Whatever group activity they were supposed to be doing seems to be over now. Someone at the front is delivering the closing remarks, and as soon as they’re done Jared’s making his way over, grinning broadly. When he arrives, there’s nothing for Gen to do but introduce him. “Jared, this is Benz,” she says.

Benz smiles and extends a courtly hand. “Most people call me Julie.”

“Hey,” Jared says. Gen sees by the flare of his nostrils the moment his nose hones in on Benz, but he just keeps smiling. Politely he engulfs her hand in his and shakes it. 

Gen waits around a while for Danneel to finish with the group she ended up in. Eventually, though, she comes and finds Gen. About that time Jared waves goodbye to Charles and DJ. Gen gives Benz a final nod. Benz nods back. Her eyes seem to be signaling some meaning that Gen doesn’t get. Gen shrugs it aside and follows Danneel and Jared out.

“So what did you think?” Jared asks once they’re all out on the sidewalk.

“It seemed cool,” Danneel says, with her usual reserve. There’s a new light in her eye, though; clearly this calls for interrogation later.

“You liked it?” Gen asks Jared.

“Yeah,” he says, smiling to himself. “They’re good people, you know? And they get me.”

It’s déjà vu, hearing Jared say basically the same thing Benz did. “I’m glad,” she says.

Gen’s a little startled when they arrive at her and Danneel’s dorm, Jared still in tow. “Were you _walking_ us _home_?” Jared shifty-eyed glance is all she needs. “You’re the lone omega, walking alone across our so very hazardous campus. Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?”

Jared blinks, and then he rubs the back of his head. “I didn’t really think of that.” 

When he turns to go, though, Gen snags his arm. “Can I ask you something?”

“Uh, sure.”

“I’m going up and getting ready for bed,” Danneel announces, and heads inside.

Gen and Jared end up sitting on the concrete wall that lines Holmen’s front steps. “So what’s up?” Jared asks – a shade cautiously, maybe.

“What do you like about your omega group?”

“Uh.” The brow furrows. 

“I mean, it sounded like it was mostly politics. Paid heat leave and media representation and stuff. Are you big into that kind of thing?”

Jared swings his feet. “Not really. Jensen’s more interested in it than I am.”

“Jensen?” Gen wrinkles her nose.

“I think it’s for me, kind of. Like a best-friend duty or something. He has a lot of rants about omega rights. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of any of them.” Now that he mentions it, Gen does remember one or two heated discussions at the caf about male omega reproductive care. Jensen’s vehemence makes a little more sense now that Gen knows about Jared. “Anyway, no, for me those kind of groups are mostly for the people. Like I said.”

“Because you understand each other.”

He ducks his head. “Yeah. They understand the heat thing and the being attracted to alpha guys thing. Being physically threatened by alphas six inches shorter than you because you turned them down. That kind of stuff.”

“Mm.” Gen lets that sit there. She swings her legs, too. Of course they swing a lot faster than Jared’s; they’re so much shorter. His shoes scuff across the ground.

“Do you not...” Jared begins. “What about the other alpha girls?”

“What about them?”

“You’re not friends with them? Like Julie?”

“I mean, you saw her.”

“Uh. Yes?”

“She’s...” Gen doesn’t say _perfect_ ; Julie’s vehement denial is too recent. “She’s got it all figured out, you know?”

“Is that a problem?”

Gen heaves a sigh. “It’s just a lot to live up to. All of them. I don’t know how to be that.”

Jared’s quiet. Gen dares a glance and finds him wrinkling his nose. She’d say it was adorable if she were still allowed to say things like that. Jared ventures, “So it’s like... competition? You’re all competing. Like in the cheesy alpha bonding movies with the sports.”

Gen has seen those movies. They never seemed in any way related to her. “Not so much. I don’t think they’re competing with me at all. They don’t...” Her eyes sting. God, she’s going to cry in front of Jared. “They don’t need to.”

“Gen?”

“I don’t know how to _be_ alpha, okay? My parents are betas. My entire family is beta, and I’m this cross-sex weirdo who popped up out of nowhere.” Gen shoves her palm against her face to smear some of the tears away. “Mom didn’t know how the hell alphas worked, much less a she-alpha, so she just raised me like, you know, a girl.”

Jared is horrified. “You didn’t _know_?” 

She sniffles. “No, no, I knew. I mean, it was pretty obvious when I was born, given...” She gestures towards her crotch. “I was either one of me or, you know, one of you. They had me tested.”

Jared nods, looking relieved.

“But, uh. I tell people I’m not just a girl with a dick, but honestly, I kind of am.” Gen shrugs. “I sure don’t know how the hell to be alpha.”

“And they do? The other alpha girls?”

Gen ducks her head and nods. She’s dripping again. “I’m pretty sure.” 

Jared makes a skeptical noise in his throat, but what he says is, “So that’s why you wanted to know about the omega group. To know how I fit in.”

“Yeah.” She laughs. It’s a wet, choking sound. “Joke’s on me, because you didn’t even want to be o-boy and you still found people that made sense to you, but I want to be a real alpha so damn bad, and...” She wipes at her cheeks. “God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dump on you. This is awkward.” 

She pushes off the wall and then startles when something tickles her arm. It’s Jared. She looks up, and she can’t really see his expression in this light, but his eyes are shining wetly. He tugs on her arm, and she follows until her face is smashed against his chest and his arms close around her.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

Gen shakes her head. It’s hard; she doesn’t have much leverage. “Not your fault.”

“I’m sorry for being an ass about the whole thing,” he says. “And I’m sorry you’re, uh, having a rough time.”

“Well. Thanks.” 

For a moment Gen lets herself just stand there. The evening air is beginning to bite, but Jared is solid and warm, just like she always knew he’d be. No doubt he smells delicious, but she can’t tell just now through all the snot. 

Gen wriggles, and Jared lets go. Gen wipes at her nose, ineffectually, and wishes for tissue. “Look, I’m gonna go.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Jared tucks his hands resolutely in the pocket of his hoodie. “Take care, okay?”

Gen nods. She turns away and pushed through the first set of doors.

Upstairs, the lights are already out. Gen sneaks out to the bathroom with her toothbrush, sneaks back in, and crawls into bed. Danneel’s voice floats down. “You have a good talk?”

Gen turns over and stares up. By light shining in the window she can just barely see the iron slats of Danneel’s mattress frame. She swallows to try and clear her throat, and says, “Uh, yeah. I guess so.”

“Good.”

Danneel doesn’t speak again, but Gen lies awake for a long time after.

\--

The door to Miner and Canning’s room is open. Gen peeks her head around the corner. Canning’s sitting at the table opposite the door. She looks up and sees Gen, and her eyebrows rise. “Yo, Miner,” she calls. “It’s Cortese.”

Out of sight, a bed frame squeaks, and then Miner steps into view. “Hey,” she says neutrally.

“Hey.” Gen fidgets; she doesn’t know where to go from here. Miner doesn’t give her any help. She just stands there, lips pursed.

Finally Miner says, “Didn’t expect to see you around.”

“Um. Yeah.”

“I mean, I finally figured it out, you know. You just don’t like us.”

“That’s not—”

“It’s okay.” Miner shrugs. It’s clear in every line of her body that this is not okay. “You get better things to do with your time, and the ladykillers aren’t good enough for you.”

Gen blinks. An idea tickles at her brain, but it can’t be true. “It’s not like that.”

“No?” Miner crowds Gen, pushing her away from the doorway. “Then what is it like, Cortese? Because me and the girls, we kinda got our feelings hurt, here.”

Gen’s breath catches. The worlds are delivered in the dry, sardonic tone that Miner is never without, but there’s a flash in Miner’s eyes that looks sincere. Gen wouldn’t have thought it possible.

She hurt Miner’s feelings. “I’m sorry,” Gen says. “I didn’t mean to.” Miner crosses her arms and waits. “I didn’t... I came over to see if you guys had climbed the signal oak yet. I wanted to come.” Miner snorts. Gen is not yet forgiven. Gen might not be forgiven for a long, long time. 

“Have you talked to Benz?” Gen asks, a little desperate, even though of course Miner hasn’t talked to Benz, at least not about Gen, because Miner wouldn’t be scowling at Gen like this.

“No.”

“Oh. Well.” Gen kicks at the doorframe. “So can I come with you guys?”

Miner thinks this over, her lips pressed in a thin, tight line, but finally she says, “Yeah. If you want to show up behind the fire pit tomorrow, you can come.” 

And that’s really the best that Gen can ask for.

\--

“You’re going again?” Danneel asks the next evening 

“We couldn’t last time,” Gen explains. She tugs on an extra layer of socks so that Danneel’s black sneakers don’t chafe, like they did last time. At least she and Danneel are _almost_ the same shoe size. “There were people.”

“What if there’s people now?”

“We’ll try again, I guess.”

“Very industrious of you.” Danneel is smirking. Gen sticks her tongue out.

\--

Miner and Canning are waiting at the fire pit when Gen gets there. They have black face paint on this time. Gen missed that memo, presumably since Miner declined to send it to her. Benz and Chikezie arrive a few moments later. “I had an exam today,” Chikezie says, by way of explanation.

“You realize this isn’t allowed,” Gen says. “You know, by the college.” Chikezie, Gen learned first thing, is very, very concerned with legality; she’s determined that nothing besmirch her med school applications.

Chikezie shrugs. “I’m not climbing any trees. I’m just the bandage squad.” She holds up a black satchel. Gen notices that Benz is wearing face paint, too. 

They wait another ten minutes for Sampson to trot out of the backdoor of Frakes. Miner surveys them all and gives a sharp nod. “Let’s go, ladykillers.”

They slink into the woods. It’s darker than when they set out last time, and they haven’t had rain in days. Gen keeps snapping twigs under her feet, and leaves rustle as she pass no matter how gingerly she steps. Good thing it’s also cooler; they’re less likely to stumble over people making out on a picnic blanket. When they get to the signal oak’s clearing, it’s, well, clear. No late-evening picnickers this time. Miner halts them all with a gesture, anyway, and takes a moment to survey. “In a line,” she whispers, and waves them forward.

It _is_ like ninjas, cheesy or no. They creep out single-file, smooth and steady. Miner leads the way, then Canning, then Sampson, with Gen and Benz bringing up the rear. Gen realizes Chikezie hasn’t moved, and she glances back. Chikezie lifts the satchel again. Right. Gen nods and turns to follow the others.

Miner gets to the trunk and waits. When Sampson gets there, she laces her fingers together, Miner steps into them, and Sampson hoists her up onto the lowest branch, four feet above the ground. One after another, Sampson lifts them up with a huff of air and a near-silent grunt. When Gen gets to her, she grins into the dark. “Hey, Cortese.”

“Hey,” Gen says. Then she steps into Sampson’s hands and rises up into the tree. She crawls to the next branch over. Behind her, she can hear Sampson scrambling up through sheer willpower. And also muscle.

Their goal is halfway up. There’s a plaque there, Gen’s always been told, nailed into the wood by the class of ’87. There carved initials from long before than that. 

This low, the branches are thicker than Gen’s waist, as solid as beams, and climbing is a matter of stretching across the gaps from one to the next. For Gen, that’s quite a stretch. She’s not sure she’s going to manage this next one. She digs the toes of her sneaker into an old, grown-over gouge in the trunk and steps into it, reaching over the next branch with her arm.

Well. Now she’s relatively secure, as long as her foot doesn’t slip, but she’s not going any further, either. 

Benz’s head pops around the trunk. She braces herself and reaches out a hand. Gen grabs it, and Benz hauls her up. She follows Benz in a helical path around the trunk. On their second turn around the tree, the branches are closer together, which makes it easier to get from one to the next, but they’re thinner, too. They shiver under Gen’s weight, and the remaining unfallen leaves rustle.

From far above comes Miner’s sharp whisper. “Got it!” Miner’s reached the carving point, then. A flashlight flicks on, its beam small and dim. Gen suddenly realizes that she is completely without any kind of cutting implement. Two minutes later, Canning’s laugh rings out, triumphant and not the least bit stealthy. 

“Shhhhh,” Sampson says, not much more quietly. Branches shake.

Gen’s found a path straight up, now – no more circling round and round the tree. Benz is two branches above of her, and Miner and Canning are perched two branches above that and a little to Gen’s left. They chatter in whispers just too low for Gen to make out the words.

Gen ends up about six feet below Miner, Canning, and Benz. There’s no room for her to get up there until someone else climbs down, and anyway she needs to borrow Miner’s pocketknife or whatever it is that she’s brought.

Sampson hauls herself up into a branch opposite Gen’s. “Good work team,” she says. Her grin is audible.

It’s another couple of minutes before Canning looks down at Gen and then disappears around the other side of the tree. A minute later, she’s level with Gen. “We’ve got the crest carved out,” she whispers. “You just have to put your initials.” Then she’s gone, working her away down the far side of the tree. 

“You next,” Sampson says.

Gen takes a deep breath and shoves her way up through the next branches. As she’s getting up to Miner’s perch, Benz slips out of sight around the other side of the tree. Then Gen is up, sitting on the branch Benz vacated.

“Here,” Miner whispers. The flashlight beam shines on Gen, and after she blinks the blindness of out of her eyes, she sees that Miner’s holding out, yes, a pocketknife, handle first. Gen grabs it. The flashlight movies to the trunk, and Gen sees what Canning meant by ‘crest’: a rectangle dug deep into the wood – over other, older carvings – and titled _Frakes_ , with the year. Canning, Miner’s and Benz’s initials are already inside the crest. Gen settles against the trunk, stabilizes herself as well as she can, and starts working on a ‘G.’

“So, what’d you come for?”

G’s are the worst. Why does Gen’s name start with G? “Because I wanted to.”

“So all that where you couldn’t stand to be around us, that was just my imagination?”

Gen could have been an Isabelle. I’s are _easy_. “Guess so.” Miner grunts, disbelieving. Gen finishes off the crossbar of the G and goes for the C. She pauses to look for words; Miner deserves some kind of explanation. Somehow, it’s easier to verbalize it in the dark, when Miner can only see her by whatever light reflects off the tree trunk, and she can’t see Miner at all. “It’s not that I thought I was too good for you,” she says finally. 

“No?”

Gen cuts the second bar of her C. “I figured it was kinda the other way around.” 

There’s a long pause. “What, seriously.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what this whole thing’s been about.”

Gen isn’t sure what the _whole thing_ encompasses, but she says, “Yeah.”

Miner huffs. “Dumbass.”

“What?” Gen says, anger already flaring sharp and hot.

“Only a dumbass would think that. About you and us.”

“Oh.”

Miner snorts. “So stop being dumb and finish, so Sampson can climb up here.”

Well, okay, then. Gen digs the last bit of her initial in, and then she hands the pocketknife back to Miner and starts the tentative climb back down. As soon as she’s around the far side of the tree, she pauses a minute to let her eyes adjust, and then she keeps going. Halfway down, she can just see the silhouettes of Benz and Canning, lounging on thick branches ten feet off the ground.

That’s a male figure steps into view below them. “Excuse me, ladies.”

“What the hell?” Canning yelps.

Gen’s halfway to the next branch, knees bent, fingers gripping the ribbed tree bark. She is not going to want to hold this position for very long. She thinks about carbon rings and organic compounds. She does not think about high up she is or how brief and hard a descent it would be.

“I’m afraid you’re breaking campus rules,” the man continues. “Climbing the trees is unsafe and can damage the trees. I’m going to have to report you to the dean.”

“Like hell,” Canning says.

From above Gen comes the scrape of sole on bark: Miner and Sampson on their way down. The guy’s talking again, just to Canning and Benz, it sounds like. Maybe he doesn’t know the rest of them are here. Gen takes the opportunity to get the rest of the way onto the next branch.

Canning’s swinging her feet and taunting the man. Gen can just barely hear Miner and Sampson above her, working their way down. She wonders why; if they stay up top, the man might very well never know they’re there

Then Miner is on the next branch over from Gen. “Get as close to the ground as you can,” she whispers. “Chikezie has a diversion. She texted me.”

Gen snorts, disbelieving. Take _that_ , ninjas.

Gen starts down again as quietly as she’s able. It helps that Canning is making a lot of noise. Gen circles around to the back of the tree and keeps going, and Miner and Sampson follow her. 

Finally, when she comes just around the tree from Benz, Miner hisses and motions her to stop. In the dim glow of the sidewalk lamp, Gen sees Miner pull out her phone and type out a text. Gen braces herself. Thirty seconds later, Chikezie’s voice calls out from the edge of the woods: “Ladies, cover your eyes!”

Gen slaps a hand over her eyes. Suddenly, the night is warmly bright, even just through the chinks between her fingers. The guy yells. The brightness is gone as suddenly as it came, and Miner yanks on Gen’s arm. “Come on!”

Gen opens her eyes, blinking against red spots, and watches as Miner scrambles down one more branch and then tumbles to the ground. After another moment’s pause, Gen does the same. She grabs at the bark to try and keep her balance and feels a scraping wrongness through the heel of her hand. Then she’s down, rolling like she learned in gym class years ago. Benz thumps down next to her. “Ah,” Benz gasps. “Damn it.” She grips her ankle with both hands.

Canning’s on Gen’s other side now. “Come on.” She grips Benz’s arm and pulls her half to her feet, and Gen grabs the other half. She shoulders under Benz’s arm and stumble away like a team in an ungainly five-legged race. Miner and Sampson beckon them into the woods.

“I got my ankle,” Benz mutters.

“Broken?” Chikezie asks.

“Sprained, I think.”

Miner looks out into the clearing. “Can you make it to Frakes? We’d be better off looking at it there.”

“I think so.”

Gen and Canning get on either side of Benz again, and they move. Forget quiet; speed is all any of them is aiming for right now. Still, it’s an anxious, interminable ten minutes back to Frakes. Sampson sticks her head out into the open. “We’re clear.”

They stumble up the back steps. The back door’s locked – as it usually is by this time of night. They stare at each other. “For God’s sake,” Chikezie says and steps forward with a key. Then they’re inside, trying to be quiet because it feels like their very breath is echoing all down the hall. Up the one flight of stairs they go and then, by unspoken agreement, to Benz and Chikezie’s room. Chikezie lets them in, and Miner shuts the door behind them all.

“Oh my God,” Canning says. She crashes onto Benz’s couch with a huge whooshing sigh. “We did that. We totally did that.”

“Ow,” says Benz.

For a few moments they all exclaim meaninglessly at each other while Chikezie looks at Benz’s ankle. “Just sprained,” she decides finally. 

“Gen’s bleeding,” Canning announces.

“What?” Gen says. But she is. Her hand. Her left hand is scraped bloody all the way across the palm. “Ouch.”

“Give it here,” Chikezie says. Gen complies, and Chikezie starts patting at it with disinfectant.

“So what was the light?” Gen asks. “What did you _do_ , Chikezie?”

“Flare gun,” she says. “It was in the emergency kit.”

“You are brilliant,” Canning says. “Uh, pun not intended.”

“This calls for booze,” Sampson says.

“Do you _have_ booze?” Miner asks. “Other than the Schnapps. Because damn could I use some real alcohol.”

“Sorry, just the Schnapps. The bottle’s almost full, though.”

“I’ll take it,” Canning says. “I have a Cosco economy-size box of Bugles in my room, too. Who’s up for a movie night?”

\--

Gen skips breakfast. An hour later, she skips her first morning class, and her second a while after that. Miner stirs sometime around eleven, which finally drags Gen upright off the futon. She blinks blearily up in Miner’s general direction. “Coffee?”

“Sorry.”

“Is lunch open yet?” Canning mumbles from the bottom bunk. She squints at her alarm clock. “Yeah, lunch is open.”

“Lunch is good,” Gen says.

“I need toothpaste,” Miner says. She grabs some from a shelf and stumps out of the room. A minute later she stumps back in, takes a toothbrush and plastic cup from the same shelf, and stumps out again.

“What about you?” Gen asks Canning.

“I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar has no need of your human toothpaste invention.” Canning sits up and rubs at her eye. “At least not until after lunch.”

They finally straggle into the caf at eleven forty-five. Gen takes her salad to a window booth and starts eating. Canning and Miner join her soon after. After ten minutes applied solemnly and solely to food, Miner takes a drink of water and says, “So that was awesome.”

“Yeah it was,” Gen says.

“We kicked _ass_ ,” Canning says, and takes another huge bite of her hamburger.

“We absolutely did. All of us.” Miner stares meaningfully at Gen.

But Gen is past the point of needing encouragement. She says, “C’mon, you know you don’t have to be nice to Canning. She can take the truth.”

“Hmhm!” Canning exclaims through her hamburger.

Miner toes at Gen under the table. Gen kicks her back.

\--

When Gen gets back to her room, Danneel is there. “Gen!” She spots the bandages all over Gen’s hand and sucks in a breath. “Are you okay?”

“I’m just scraped up,” Gen assures her. “I’m gonna shower, okay?” She gets back from the shower, damp and clean-smelling, and starts applying new band aids to her hand. Clothes should follow, probably. She really should go to her two o’clock class. It’s Pellegrino; she can’t afford to skip, not that she really wants to.

“So it was fun?” Danneel says, sitting on Gen’s bed. Absently she pets the fuzzy squirrel on Gen’s comforter.

“It was _awesome_.”

Danneel laughs. “Glad to hear it.”

Gen pushes her head through her t-shirt. “Yeah. It was cool. We had fun. Evaded a security guy, even.”

“Yikes.”

“Mm.” Dressed, Gen stares aimlessly around the room. Backpack. Binder. These are things she will want soon.

“Gen?”

“Yeah,” Gen says. It takes her a moment to notice that Danneel doesn’t answer. She turns and looks at Danneel, who’s got her hands clasped in her lap, looking anxious. “Hey, what’s up?” Gen sits down next to her.

“So, uh,” Danneel begins. “So I’m going to be gone Friday night.”

“Uh, okay. Is there a retreat or something?”

There’s a long pause. Danneel picks at her fingernail, Finally she says, “You know Jensen’s family lives here in town?”

“Ye-es.”

“So I’m going to spend the night at his place, and he and his mom and I are going into the city on Saturday. She’s taking us shopping.”

“Well, hey.”

Danneel sneaks her a glance. “I get the guest bedroom.”

“Hey, I wasn’t implying.” Gen squints at Danneel. “That sounds like fun.”

“Yeah.” Danneel nods firmly. “I think it will be.”

Gen hesitates, because this topic has been verboten pretty much since she met Danneel, but finally she says, “You know, meeting the parents, spending the night – that’s the kind of thing people do with their boyfriends.”

Danneel’s response is barely audible. “I know.”

“So, you...” Gen doesn’t want to push, here, but she thinks this needs saying. “...you might actually be dating Jensen.”

“Yeah. I know.” Danneel gives Gen a small, rueful smile. “It’s just. Gen. I don’t—” She shrugs tightly. “I’m scared of this dating thing.”

Gen scoots a little closer to Danneel, until their elbows are touching. “You like Jensen a lot, right?”

Danneel laughs. “Yeah.”

“Well, I do, too, for the record. Not like that,” Gen hastens. “But he seems like a pretty all-right guy. He gets the Genevieve Cortese stamp of approval, subject to further evaluation.”

“Thanks. That means a lot, actually.” Danneel smiles thinly at Gen.

“And if actual dating still freaks you out too much, you can go back to not-dating him for a while. He’s pretty patient. I bet he’d wait.”

That’s true,” Danneel sniffs.

“And if he’s mean to you, they will never find the body.”

Danneel snorts. “That is a great comfort to me, thank you.”

Gen puts her arms around Danneel. Into Danneel’s hair, Gen says, “I think it’s gonna be okay.”

Danneel heaves a sigh and nods, knocking her head against Gen’s in the process. Gen yelps and disentangles from Danneel, and for a while there’s only giggling. Finally, Danneel manages to say, “Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s going to be okay.” She grimaces. “And now you’re going to tease me, right?”

“I’ll tease you tomorrow,” Gen promises.

\--

Gen goes to Pellegrino’s class and dutifully takes down the notes, and she spends the whole hour thinking about ladykillers and tree climbing and Danneel and taking important steps. 

As soon as class lets out, she walks the eight blocks into town. Main is full of cutesy gift shops, and one of them, she knows, sells flowers. She looks over the fresh-cut ones for a while, but it seems dumb to buy something that’s going to die within a couple of weeks, even with watering – what kind of romantic message is that that? They have chrysanthemums, though, too, yellows and reds and burnt oranges, all in pots. She picks a deep orangey red one, on the reasoning that Jared’s hoodie a few nights ago was the same color, so he must like it okay.

It’s possible she’s hopeless at romance.

The next part is easier. Two doors down is a candy store, the kind Gen gets a sugar high from just by walking in the door. Gen collects saltwater taffy and honey sticks and candied grapefruit wedges together in a red cellophane bag, and the guy at the counter ties it shut with a ribbon.

At a much snarkier gift shop than the one that sold the flowers, Gen finds joke toothpaste that supposedly tastes like beer. She unties her bag of candy and slips it inside, and she figures she’s done.

When she gets back to campus, it’s almost five, and she’s meeting Danneel for dinner. Gen fidgets all through it; Danneel and Adrianne have to carry the conversation without her. Back at the dorm, she takes a shower and puts herself together. She takes special care with her make-up, shading a little bolder and sharper in approved ladykiller fashion, but not so much as to freak Jared out, hopefully.

She’s going to do this _right_ , this time.

She calls first, just to be sure. “Is Jared around?” she asks Jensen. He affirms that Jared is indeed around – the bathroom, he thinks. Is Jared going to be around for a while? Jensen seems to think he is. Okay, then.

Gen gets to Petersen and rides its elevator with its myriad stifling scents up all ten floors. She stands at Jared and Jensen’s door maybe half a minute, straining to hear sounds of movement within, but people are clattering up and down the hall, and the door’s thick. Finally, she screws up all her courage – and a bit extra, it feels like, that’s she taken a lease out for and will have to pay back later with interest – and she knocks.

Gen hears shuffling behind the door, and it’s all she can do to keep standing there while a voice keeps muttering in the back of her head, _Alpha up, Cortese_. The door swings open, and it’s Jensen. His eyebrows rise. Jensen eyes her for a moment, speculative, and then he opens the door wider. “It’s Gen,” he calls behind him.

Jared’s head sticks out from the around the edge of the door. He’s sitting in a chair at one of the built-in desk and bookshelf combos Petersen boasts, his headphones mashed over his ears. He pulls one off. “Hey,” he says. 

Gen tries to ignore Jensen’s eyes on her. “I was wondering if I could talk to you.” Jared makes some aborted motion, and she hastens, “It can be later, if you’re busy.”

He glances down at his desk and makes a face at the textbook lying there. “Now’s good.”

Jensen looks back and forth between Jared and the flowerpot, and he says, “I’m gonna go... study. In the lounge.” He grabs his laptop – which is paused on an episode of _Sailor Moon_ , unless Gen is very much mistaken – and heads out the door.

“Uh, okay then,” Jared says. “Come on in.” 

Now Gen presents Jared with the chrysanthemum. “I brought you flowers,” she says. “Or a flower.”

“So you did,” Jared agrees, looking down at the flower in befuddlement. “Uh, thank you.”

“Ooh, and...” Gen takes her bag off, digs into it, and brings out the red cellophane bag. “For you.”

Jared’s eyes light immediately. “ _Awesome_ ,” he says. Hurriedly he places the chrysanthemum pot on his desk and grabs for the bag. “This place has the best stuff.” He digs around, brings out a piece of green taffy streaked with purple, unwraps it, and pops it in his mouth. He holds the open bag out to Gen. “You want?” he mumbles.

“I’m good, thanks,” Gen says. At least he likes candy.

Still in a mumble, Jared asks, “So what’s the occasion?”

It seems silly to say now. “I’m romancing you,” Gen says.

Jared blinks and opens his mouth, then clearly thinks better of it and sets to swallowing his taffy as quickly as possible. When he finally he gets it down, though, he doesn’t seem to know what to say.

“Can I sit down?” Gen asks.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah.” Jared gestures her to Jensen’s brilliantly lime green futon and sits down next to her.

“Look,” she begins. She pauses to lick her lips. “I like you, okay? And not just how you smell. I swear.”

Jared huffs a laugh. That’s a good sign, right?

“You’re nice, too, and you’re...” Gen squares her shoulders and continues, “You’re the first cross-sex person I’ve ever dated. Which, maybe that’s a recipe for disaster, I don’t know.”

“Experience so far suggests yes,” Jared says. His eyebrows quirk with amusement. Point for Gen.

“Well, I don’t care. You know how I said I didn’t really date? Well, I want to date _you_. I want to hang out and talk to you and watch dumb movies with you and maybe cuddle under the covers and make out. I never really wanted that with anyone before, because, I don’t know, I’m made of stone or something. I’m...” Gen scowls. “I’m not very romantic, I guess.”

Jared considers her very carefully. “But you want to be now. With me.”

“Yeah.” Gen’s cheeks flush mightily, but there’s no point holding back now. “You’re the first person I’ve ever wanted to be all goopy with. Maybe it is just because you smell good. I don’t know.” Gen shrugs. Jared opens his mouth to speak, but Gen can’t let him yet. “But if you don’t want to, if that’d be awkward or you’re not ready or whatever, then just tell me. Say the word, and I won’t bother you anymore. I promise.”

Jared shifts his weight on the sofa, staring down at their . “I, uh,” he begins, and stops. Gen grips the edges of the upholstery a little tighter. He smiles, slow and shy and warm. “I think I’d like that.”

It takes a moment for Gen to process the words, and even then she’s not sure. “Which?”

“The, um. The dating.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. The dumb movies and the cuddling. All of it. But,” he says, and Gen’s heart about stops. “But sex, too, right?”

He looks so earnest, and he smells _so_ good. She knows some of the Jared-specific scents now, the particular tangs and piquancies that distinguish him from every other human alive. She wants to know them all. She wants to keep rubbing shoulders with this boy, and other parts, obviously, _all_ possible parts, lips and temples and toes and knees, and she never wants to stop. She wants to breathe in that scent, look into those laughing hazel eyes every damn day for the rest of her existence. She wants to still discover new nuances in them when she’s ninety. 

Or at least next week. Let’s get them that far, first. “I think sex can be arranged at some point,” she says. 

“Then I think,” Jared begins, very slowly. “I think I’d like that a lot.”

 

[end]

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you'd like to leave feedback but prefer commenting on LJ, you're welcome to comment on the LJ masterpost [here](http://snickfic.livejournal.com/414318.html). The artist's masterpost is [here](http://scarletscarlet.livejournal.com/136014.html).


End file.
